The Start-Up Factory: How Entrepreneurialism Captured Higher Education (Critical University Studies)

How the cult of capitalism reshaped the American university-and hollowed it out from within. Over the past several decades, American universities have been remade as engines of entrepreneurial ambition.Technology transfer offices, business incubators, pitch competitions, innovation hubs, and leadership centers now sit at the heart of campus life, radically altering how institutions describe their purpose, structure curricula, and imagine student success.The Start-Up Factory argues that this shift has come at a steep cost. James Rushing Daniel traces the rise of entrepreneurialism in higher education and shows how universities came to embrace the figure of the founder as both ideal and benefactor.Business leaders-many of them major donors-are celebrated as singular visionaries, their values imported into academic life and framed as models for intellectual work.This reverence, Daniel argues, has narrowed the university's sense of public responsibility for distorted academics, and transfo