ABSTRACT
Universities in most parts of the world are creatures of either church or state, governed by a bishop or minister, and funded by church income or taxes. The American university, in a major historical shift, changes that. It achieves the institutional emancipation of the university from external, non-academic oversight and establishes itself on a plan of organizational independence and self-governance. The process by which the American university became an independent institution, rather than a creature of state, church, or market, constitutes the major design innovation at the macro level. But it also raises some interesting questions. We know, for example, that absence of strong government control often means weak quality standards.2 How did the American university beat this trend? In the United States, despite the absence of central government controlling and governing the university, higher education assumed an astounding degree of coherence at a high level of quality. Everywhere else in the world, such feats of coordination and standardization would most likely have been accomplished by the coordinated efforts that are the prerogative of central government action. In the United States, fortuitous coincidences conspired to produce institutional innovations, which, together, produced a system of higher education with high quality standards coupled with low degrees of government control. In this chapter, I consider the key institutions that made this innovation possible: the trustee-governed corporation; philanthropy and the philanthropic foundation; and the American alumnus. Together, these institutional innovations have changed the complexion of higher education from a uniform state franchise into an assemblage of distinct and independent institutions connected through myriad sentimental ties to overlapping communities of supporters and stakeholders.
