Some Historical Perspectives

My central concern in this chapter is with innovation in the American university community. I have chosen to begin with the term “innovation” rather than “entrepreneurship” because I propose to deal with issues that take us well beyond “entrepreneurship,” as that term is ordinarily used. I by no means ignore the traditional entrepreneur, but I also address larger themes such as the creation and the institutionalization of new academic disciplines and the roles that they have played, in turn, in the discovery and the diffusion of (potentially) useful knowledge.

The trajectory taken in the United States versus Europe owes a great deal to the political system in which it occurs. After the Napoleonic Wars, institutions of higher education in much of continental Europe became, overwhelmingly, public. In effect, they were nationalized, with extensive centralized control as the inevitable accompaniment of centralized funding. University faculty became civil servants.

Higher education in the United States was shaped by a very different set of political forces, the most distinguishing feature of which was an aversion to the centralization of power. The federalization of the country in the last two decades of the eighteenth century translated into the localization of decision making as well as financial support of the educational system.