This book reconstructs the changing relations between higher education, capitalism, and state power in the United States. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of the integral state, it examines those relations across historically uneven university forms: the corporate university, the market university, and the emerging State university. It shows how each form organizes knowledge, administration, labor, and legitimacy through uneven and contested relations with political society, while asking higher education to carry promises of security, mobility, and democratic possibility that it cannot redeem on its own. The present reorganization of higher education becomes especially visible in Florida, where inherited university forms are being redirected toward more direct political rule. The book concludes by asking how higher education might become a site for rebuilding democratic capacity rather than preserving the neoliberal university or yielding to authoritarian rule.

Daniel B. Saunders is an Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at Florida International University and has served as president and lead negotiator for the FIU chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. He earned his doctorate in Educational Policy and Leadership from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011 and previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published widely in the field of higher education, and his scholarship focuses on political economy, academic labor, and knowledge production.