Tim Kaufman-Osborn’s book (2023), The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities, is a powerful contribution to a growing literature on contemporary higher education in the United States. The field of critical university studies rests on a consensus that American universities are in a crisis provoked by a confrontation between timeless values and the exigencies of survival in a capitalist framework of education as a commodity (Boggs and Mitchell Reference Boggs and Mitchell2018, 434–36). Researchers warn that the higher-education system—once perceived as a critical mechanism for equality, economic and social mobility, and democratic enrichment—has collapsed into austerity and mechanistic models that privilege narrow calculations of return on investment (Fabricant and Brier Reference Fabricant and Brier2016). The Autocratic Academy takes a different approach, considering the path-dependent evolution of universities as corporate entities. What Boggs and Mitchell (Reference Boggs and Mitchell2018) called the crisis consensus—which locates the problems in the loss of an “ideal university” beginning in the late-twentieth century—instead stems from the institutional form of American higher education, itself the product of choices made early in the development of colleges as institutions in American history. Whereas late-stage capitalism produced historic inequality, intensified socioeconomic rationing, starved public agencies, and undercut the fundamental commitment to access that previously characterized American higher education (Fabricant and Brier Reference Fabricant and Brier2016, 20–33), Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) resists pointing to neoliberalism’s triumph over New Deal/Civil Rights Era values and commitments, interrogating a much longer institutional history.

Although Kaufman-Osborn does not explicitly use American political development (APD), his longer time frame, developmental analysis, and focus on corporate form resonate with APD, helping readers to understand not only how we have reached the current state of affairs but also what range of institutional options is now available. He makes a compelling argument that we cannot go forward by going back. Autocracy, the key driver, precedes austerity and established the conditions under which the supposedly deeply rooted egalitarian and democracy-enhancing purposes of public higher education, in particular, collapsed so quickly and completely.

The Autocratic Academy (2023) centers a critical orienting question: What type of entity did the university charter create, and what is its relationship to the state? By tracing this question of how universities evolved institutionally, the book analyzes how the states have used the university and why the debate over meaningful and robust faculty governance is misplaced. As a field, APD focuses on institutions and their foundations, recognizing that once an institution is established, it carves out a developmental path that may be difficult to shift. The tools of APD can help us “to make sense of a changing world” in ways that other approaches to studying contemporary US politics and institutions cannot (Galvin and Thurston Reference Galvin and Thurston2022).

The Autocratic Academy establishes the foundational institutional structure of early American universities as corporations that preceded the modern capitalist form, reflecting tension between republican and autocratic governance models (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 63–81). Thinking in APD terms, after the institution of the university was established, a critical juncture occurred in the early 1800s when a power struggle between the president and trustees of Dartmouth College reached the US Supreme Court. The Court established the idea of a college as “an autocratic private government” protected from political interference but left to the concentrated governing authority of its trustees. It rejected the alternative model of a small republican body harmoniously housed within the broader political republic (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 128–29). The case created an institutional entity that exists independently from and therefore is not a creature of the state. Thus, governing boards can be in positions of both authority over and separated from “those subject to their authority” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 129).

For Kaufman-Osborn, this legal and institutional alchemy set American universities on their path toward corporate autocracy that would develop further in response to broader developments of the corporation as a legal form. In APD terms, the initial institutional arrangement established in the early 1800s became self-reinforcing through path dependence as both power and institutional arrangements became entrenched. This system then responded to the transformation of corporations in the late-nineteenth century to support the development of large-scale capitalism. These developments empowered and entrenched the new form of autocratic corporate leadership, and the modern university reproduced itself over generations.

Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) summarizes waves of reformist and protest literature but argues that efforts to call for a new commitment to universities’ original republican purpose fell short. Faculty governance in this reading becomes a mythic “Holy Grail” that current and past reformers have invested with misguided nostalgia. The critical junctures of the establishment of the autocratic path, its engagement with the modern capitalist corporate form, and the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP’s) bargain to accept autocracy in exchange for a limited zone for faculty autonomy and self-governance (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 163–93) foreclosed a vision that never existed in its imagined form.

This analysis does not deny contemporary critiques of the university as an expression of late-stage capitalism, and Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) agrees that modern universities are expressions of late-stage capitalism. However, the broader protest literature that criticizes the commodification of higher education, the relentless shrinking of the bounded space for faculty autonomy secured by the AAUP, and the professionalization of management all conform to the tortured governing logic of the autocratic academy. In contrast, Kaufman-Osborn’s (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) narrative explains the significantly deeper institutional roots that facilitated this arrangement and also provides a little-recognized but historically based utopian alternative. Rather than relitigating the fight over faculty governance—a fight that itself has led to path-dependent outcomes shrinking that space—reviving the republican model of the corporation could provide a more fruitful path forward.

The contradictions that Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) notes are particularly acute with respect to state universities. As APD scholar Patricia Strach (Reference Strach2009) has shown, even when federal policy makers have agreed that funding higher education is good policy, the first major investment supporting broader access (i.e., the GI Bill) robustly provided this support to a specific constituency. Her APD account noted that this precedent placed federal funding on a developmental path favoring a limited toolbox of portable tools and empowering individual institutions to manage the expenditures, thereby downplaying perceptions of strong federal involvement and policy direction (Strach Reference Strach2009). Public higher education benefited greatly from the influx of funding to serve a rapidly growing economy, high demand from veterans, and ultimately the baby boom generation. Student demands for transformation within and outside of the university led to change but also provoked institutional resistance (Fabricant and Brier Reference Fabricant and Brier2016, 40–90).

The history of public funding for higher education in New York illustrates how developmental processes can destabilize commitments to values. New York initially embraced a value-based vision of rendering higher education more widely accessible. Nevertheless, an APD reading of the sequence of events alongside Kaufman-Osborn’s (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) understanding of governance illustrates how programs that initially seemed aligned with the lost values of the critical consensus ultimately became part of the crisis narrative. New York began supporting individual access to higher education with its Regents College Scholarship Program in 1913, which expanded both the size of the stipend and the number of scholarships distributed in the post–World War II era (Pearson Reference Pearson1967, 32–33). In 1967, the Commissioner of Education in New York investigated the state’s progress toward creating “open access to higher education on the part of the great majority of its young people,” recognizing that financial aid was critical for success (Pearson Reference Pearson1967, 1). In the mid-1970s, New York expanded tuition assistance for residents, using redistributive policy to increase access, promote generational advancement, and reduce the gap between the cost of public and private education (Moore Reference Moore1978, 484–97). A laggard in building a state university system, by the mid-1980s, New York had the most generous program of support to private colleges and students attending them of any state in the nation (Reynolds and Baynes Reference Reynolds and Baynes1986, 234–35). The aim of all of this spending seemed to be based on the idea of access to higher education as a relatively unexamined good.

Whereas the goal of access has not changed, the mechanisms and purposes have, in ways that parallel Kaufman-Osborn’s (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) account of the rise of autocratic governance structures. Policies have reinforced and expanded the initial structures rather than generating transformational change; as the values attached to access have shifted, so too has the nature of the state’s investment in it. The most recent effort, the Excelsior Scholarship, was rolled out in 2017 to make tuition free at state institutions for low-income students. The program, however, funded only tuition, not other expenses, and initially required full-time study and the successful completion of 30 credits in a prior year for continuation of the benefit (Dvorkin and Viney Reference Dvorkin and Viney2020). The current iteration maintains limits that expect students to focus on completing major and minor requirements and requires them to commit to remaining in New York for a period equivalent to the award period (Higher Education Services Corporation n.d.). Whereas New York and other states continue to support higher education through both public and nonprofit institutions, tuition assistance increasingly is treated as a purely economic investment. Programs are designed to maximize economic efficiency and returns, and the broader republican purpose of higher education has no line item on the balance sheet. Austerity, although not inevitable when viewed in comparative context, is politically entrenched as policy, particularly with regard to public institutions (Fabricant and Brier Reference Fabricant and Brier2016, 5–6).

How then can we get to Kaufman-Osborn’s (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) robust, civic, and democracy-supporting vision? Perhaps his Commonwealth University—higher education that revives the republican corporate model—is a utopian dream, but it provides a positive alternative to the defensive and critical posture that characterizes much of the writing about higher education. From the standpoint of APD, this moment—in which funding models and the purpose of higher education seem fraught, contradictory, and unsustainable—may be a critical juncture that reopens possibilities. Path dependence is not an iron law, and the existence of alternative paths in the past suggests not only that it could have been otherwise but also that, under enough pressure that stems from democratic and republican values rather than economic efficiency, it still can be otherwise.