Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University

The full integration of public higher education in the United States into the global capitalist economy should come as no surprise to anyone. Catherine Chaput makes the case in Inside the Teaching Machine that despite the Morrill Act and its aim of turning out “critical citizens,” the U.S. system of public higher education has always worked to produce subjects whose labor would promote the aims of national and, later, international capital. She goes further to claim that U.S. public higher education in its most recent iteration has served as a model for, and has in fact made possible, the creation of a post-professional class of knowledge workers who naturalize the system of global capital so much that we, along with the university chancellors, deans, and alumni who do the cheerleading, seem eager to embrace it. Chaput presents a historical materialist and rhetorical analysis explaining how cultural, political, and economic spheres...