Emily J. Levine. Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2021. 384pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780226341811
This review reads Emily Levine’s transatlantic history of the German-American research university against three interpretive temptations: the triumphalist narrative of American ascendancy, the great-men-and-women account of visionary leaders, and the question of what the story leaves out. Against the first, the review argues that Levine’s most important contribution is to show that institutional change is never linear or one-directional — the exchange was a process of competitive emulation, cooperation, and borrowing at multiple levels that produced genuine hybridization on both sides of the Atlantic, not a simple transfer from a declining Germany to a rising America. Against the second, the review notes that Levine’s concept of the “academic social contract” – the ongoing negotiation between universities, nations, markets, and local communities – is more analytically powerful than any focus on individual actors alone, because it captures how institutions sustain themselves across changing circumstances. The third line of reading raises two questions the book leaves open: the degree to which the fates of individual institutions are structurally linked to one another within national systems, and what lessons this history holds for knowledge centers on the other side of the Pacific — places that have moved, or aspire to move, from being receivers of knowledge to producers of it. The review concludes that Levine’s account is indispensable for anyone serious about the historical sociology of universities, and expresses the hope that it will reach Chinese readers in translation.