ABSTRACT
The recent trends of politicization of university governance, privatization, and restructuring, along with the increasing tension between institutional autonomy and public calls for accountability, have led scholars to question the nascent purposes of higher education (Tierney, 2006).1 Indeed, to what extent are universities capable of producing public goods such as preparing citizens for democracy and educating the workforce for a robust economy? How strong should universities’ emphasis be on higher education as a private good, namely, as a personal advantage in the competition for better employment opportunities and upward social mobility? Far from trivial, the teleological question of higher education strikes at the core of universities’ raison d’être and exposes multiple philosophies that underlie that enterprise. More importantly, when endorsed by authorities, the purposes of higher education create scripts of what postsecondary institutions and an educated nation should be. In other words, they prescribe certain higher education policy and certain visions of college-educated nationhood. To analyze these scripts is therefore to uncover what Foucault (1972) called “regimes of truth” and their operation in the construction of American higher education and citizenship.
