Scholars Award: Industrial Patronage and the Cold War University

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After World War II, science began to drive the development of new consumer and military technologies. The proposed research will focus on the history of academia-industry scientific research collaborations. It will deepen our knowledge of how science was conducted in the post-war era. This proposed investigation will illustrate the common ground between academic and industrial scientific interests. By doing a historical study of these relationships the proposed research will provide a thorough understanding of how academia and industry have formed successful collaborations in the past. By focusing on historical cases in which universities and businesses crafted partnerships, the proposed research identifies historical models that can inform contemporary research policy. The proposed research will advance our historical understanding of how and why academia and industry collaborated to support scientific research during the Cold War. Historians have previously investigated university-industry collaborations to show how some of them supported American military interests during the Cold War and at times steered their research towards economic and military interests. This proposal will do a broader survey of institutions in order to situate existing understanding of academia-industry partnerships within a larger, knottier story about American science, technology, academia, and industry. The proposed research will develop case studies through historical research in university, foundation, and corporate archives. These studies will help answer the questions of 1) the extent to which the motives driving industrial investment in science were contingent, and less rigid than is sometimes assumed, and 2) the degree to which individual institutions had agency to determine the shape and direction of their research programs and the character of their institutional partnerships.