Allies and Rivals

Levine's insightful, engaging account of the modern university's origins tells a compelling story of the university's key role as a bridge between state and society. But Allies and Rivals also offers a haunting narrative of how that relationship can sour. This close historical comparison of the origins of the university in Germany and the United States is full of rich detail that ultimately offers a powerful and prescient warning from the past about the possibilities of the present. * Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University * In another breakthrough study, Levine reconstructs the transatlantic history of how higher learning became associated with the now-familiar institutional setting of the research university-a history with great relevance to our own need to reimagine education for a new era. With its examination of national and urban competition over a century, alongside diffusion, entrepreneurship, and hybridization, Allies and Rivals is a new kind of history of the unfinished project of education, and a warrant to reconsider the ongoing transformation of our own institutions today. * Samuel Moyn, Yale University * Allies and Rivals is a beautifully researched and written exploration of the modern research university. It reveals the modern university to be a thing of paradox, a product of modernity and of international exchange, a jewel in the crown of the US-German relationship, and no less a product of competition, nationalism, and the many disruptions that mark the history of the early twentieth century. Levine has contributed a pathbreaking study of ideas, institutions, and international affairs-an extraordinary and riveting story. * Michael Kimmage, The Catholic University of America * Allies and Rivals, which explores the evolution of higher education in America and Germany during the nineteenth century through post-World War II, makes it clear that universities will always be in conversation with the state and society. Levine concludes that 'the university must strike a bargain with the state and society' and that 'any new contract must value autonomy and responsibility equally'. Anyone interested in this bargain would benefit from reading Allies and Rivals to understand where we are today, how we got here, and how the relationship between higher education, the state, and society more broadly must and can benefit all three. * Catharine B. Hill, senior trustee of Yale University and former president of Vassar College *