Christopher Newfield, UCSB
"Early Post-Capitalism: Humanism and Craft Labor in Mid-Century Academic Work"

Many studies of university- industry relations have generated a "rise and fall" narrative, in which the university's founding ethic of free inquiry is increasingly subordinated to industry's politically potent need for new products. In reality, the American research university has always been rising and falling at the same time. A particularly interesting combination of these movements occurred during the development of big science through enormous new federal sponsorship after the Second World War. Much scientific research became dependent on military and industrial requirements, and yet the culture of this research was often something else. Academic and political bureaucracies sheltered researchers from product pressures. Government agencies insisted on the public trusteeship rather than the private patenting of publicly funded inventions. Some economists published studies showing that what we'd now call the "knowledge commons" increased rather than discouraged innovation. Universities wrote policies that protected curiosity-driven research from the search for industrial applications. Research productivity, in short, seemed to rise in direct proportion to research's socialization. And in the midst of this socialized work arose a romantic cult of scientific creativity, one which prized individual autonomy, experimentalism, and discontinuous, non linear thinking. I'm particularly interested in this conjunction of socialized and individualized labor. It rested on a craft-labor tradition that survived (and sustained) professionalization, a tradition articulated in the radical humanism of mid-century influences like John Dewey and C.L.R. James. This conjunction also suggests a way out of current conflicts around intellectual property in a knowledge economy.

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