Matthew Levin, Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public universities are political institutions, not only in the sense that they are statefunded, but also that they function as cradles of social and political dissent against the state.In Cold War University, Matthew Levin explores the paradoxical relationship between these two aspects of the public university in postwar America.His study centres on the University of Wisconsin-Madison (hereafter, "Wisconsin" or "UW-Madison"), one of America's leading public universities, and, in the 1960s, an important centre of New Left student activism.Levin argues that Wisconsin was one of many "Cold War universities" in the postwar years.In other words, the federal government funded such universities generously for Cold War-related research.This unprecedented infusion of government money allowed universities to expand, but in the process, it created the conditions for the emergence of a vibrant movement of student radicals.As Levin explains, this "was the contradiction in American higher education that emerged during these years, with universities becoming increasingly central to the Cold War struggle even as they became centers of protest against Cold War policies" (7).The author's framework of analysis is not entirely new; Rebecca Lower coined the term "cold war university" in her study of Stanford, and Jeremy Suri has written about the "contradictions of the Cold War" in the context of West Berlin's Free University.What makes Levin's argument unique is that he uses this framework to analyze radical student activism at a large American public university.One of the strengths of Levin's work is that it demonstrates how the Cold War university environment of the 1940s and 1950s laid the foundations for the appearance of a New Left scene in the 1960s.Consequently, he devotes the first three chapters to the history of UW-Madison in the early postwar period.The first chapter explores the growth of federal funding in the decades following the Second World War.The next
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".