Articles

Higher Education as an Industrial Process: What University Archives Reveal about the History of Corporate, Scientific America

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Abstract

In recent years historians have begun to dig around in their own backyards, having tardily discovered the rich, largely untapped deposits contained in their university archives. As Edith Blendon, former acting archivist at Princeton University, noted that scholars are finding these resources valuable for far-ranging intellectual, social and political histories, well beyond the scope of the local, narrow institutional studies for which they traditionally have been used. In anticipation of, and in response to, this new activity, university archivists have been busy making these resources accessible as never before and conveying to prospective researchers the generally unappreciated value of their holdings. Meanwhile, the historians who have already been making use of these materials have become better able to recognize their broader significance and can now convey this new awareness to the archivist, who can then proceed to assemble the materials in an historically meaningful way. This article is a small contribution of the latter sort; essentially, it illustrates how university archives have been (by this historian) and might be used to gain valuable insight into modem industrial development. Examining briefly the historical process whereby higher education in this country became an industrial process in itself and an integral, functioning part of the larger corporate-scientific society illustrates how university archives are valuable resources for the historian of modern America, affording entree to an otherwise obscured and restricted past.

How to Cite:

Noble, D. F., (1977) “Higher Education as an Industrial Process: What University Archives Reveal about the History of Corporate, Scientific America”, Archival Issues 2(2), 35–53.