Making the global university: UC Berkeley, modern research cultures, and American imperialism in the Pacific, 1873–1941

Abstract

Research universities in the United States have served as global role model institutions and benchmarks for proliferating neoliberal audit cultures in higher education because of their high research productivity and international academic authority. Based on original archival research funded by a British Academy grant, this paper provides a critical geographical research perspective on the emergence of modern research cultures in the University of California, Berkeley, a public university built on the territory of the Indigenous Chochenyo Ohlone people since 1873. Focusing on the professionally motivated academic journeys of Berkeley researchers and academics across the Pacific and in Pacific rim countries during the first seven decades of the university's existence, the analysis critically interrogates the complex, contingent, and ambivalent ways in which overseas academic travel was used for the production of geographical, academic, and imperial knowledges, practices, and networks in the globalizing research university. Building on the insights of previous research about the nature and global geographies of imperial travels by academics from the University of Cambridge, 1885-1962, this paper argues that transnational academic mobilities for research and expertise from Berkeley coproduced American empire building and world hegemony, as well as some of the material resources, academic practices, and geographical imaginations that have underpinned the intellectual authority ascribed to modern American research cultures at home and abroad.