There is a standard story about the American and German research universities repeated endlessly—and it is wrong. That account has it that the research university began in Germany, traveling to Johns Hopkins and then Harvard in the last third of the nineteenth century. Levine shows, convincingly, that the two countries had a much more interesting alliance/rivalry, with the Americans taking up the idea of research, and the Germans adapting the intra-American university rivalry and integration of teaching with research.

Peter Mandler accomplishes three important goals. First, he shows that despite the antiquity of the oldest British university, the aim of providing more than elementary education in England is a relatively new phenomenon, hard fought (often from below, not from above) to secure secondary and tertiary education. Second, he casts a rigorous historical eye not only on the famous reports and studies that helped shape British education, but also on the history of the social science and bureaucratic moves that enabled these reports. Third, he tracks the long-running tension between meritocracy and democracy in British society, key to understanding current debates about the fundamental aims of higher education.

Zheng presents a feminist analysis of the contingent labor (non-tenure-track, NTT) positions that have proliferated across universities and national borders. For the US, the ratio of tenure track (TT) to NTT has gone from 70% to 30% some fifty years ago to the inverse today, 30% TT versus 70% NTT. She casts a sharp, critical eye on meritocratic arguments, but most importantly addresses the historical and ideological reasons that women are so over-represented in these insecure jobs (in the European Union women are about 1.5 times more likely to be among the “casual” labor force). Astutely, Zheng notes that academic precarity builds on long-standing gender stereotypes that put women in more “reproductive” rather than “productive” roles, and that single them out more than men for caretaking responsibilities—taking care of students’ well-being rather than research engagement.

This is a short overview of conservative academic philanthropy. It very usefully outlines—and gives many references to the study of—some key benefactor families (e.g. Walgreen, Olin, and Koch). Walsh is particularly interested in tracking the ways that these foundations of the right have been successful in institutionalizing academic research along free-enterprise, libertarian, and anti-statist lines—starting with the Chicago School in economics. Of particular interest is the contrast the author proposes, offering this as a topic for further inquiry, between the often efficacious intervention by the donors of the right rather than the less controlling donations of their more liberal peers.

Using interviews and other discursive methods, Koch and Vora put into question the simple binary that sets American universities on the liberal democratic side and their franchise branches elsewhere (e.g. Arabian peninsula, China, Singapore, Central Asia) as lesser, anti-liberal, even non-modern. The authors want to put pressure on such characterizations, looking to see how faculty in these extensions of the university see questions of authoritarian governments and, by contrast, the American “home’ institutions. Agree or disagree, the article rotates our perspective on this novel, global, and expanding reach of North American universities.

Hoffman very usefully aims to shift away from the post-hoc or universal characterization of commercially-inflected, university-based scientific work. Not for him the “triple helix” or “mode-2” or “Pasteur’s Quadrant”—various attempts to capture once and for all interdisciplinary research as a new path toward innovation. Instead, Hoffman wants a more processual account, more focused, in a lively AI lab example, on the moment-to-moment adjustments to commercial opportunity. The payoff of this paper is a promising emphasis on the style of research that emerges as this new breed of scientist tries to stay “nimble,” keeping some remove from the in-depth digging that more academic structures encourage.