Degrees of Empire: Noncitizen Students and the Making of U.S. Higher Education

A sweeping history of how noncitizen students shaped U.S. universitiesFrom colonial missionary schools to the globalized university of the twentieth century, U.S. higher education has long depended on students who were never meant to belong.Degrees of Empire tells the untold history of how noncitizen students - Indigenous youth, students from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and others positioned outside the boundaries of citizenship - have been central to the making of American universities and the expansion of U.S. power. Tracing the intertwined development of higher education, immigration law, and imperial governance from the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth, Abigail Boggs shows how universities functioned as fundamental instruments of empire.Noncitizen students were recruited and educated under conditions of surveillance, restriction, and impermanence, trained to circulate knowledge, labor, and political ideals on behalf of the United States even as they were denied fu