well, the main thing that seems to appeal to fairly traditional “public good” notions of the university was this speech:
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2009/09/tj-clarks-speech-from-uc-occupation.asp

It doesn’t really invoke nostalgic images of the past university, but I guess is more like a defense of the land-grant state U ideal that would serve its state’s citizens. I don’t really have time to do further research just now on the discourse coming out of California, but your characterization of the stuff circulated on edufactory etc is certainly accurate. Anyway, thanks for the tip on Washburn!

Jennifer Washburn’s book actually gives a pretty solid history of Bayh Dole and its implementation. I don’t think Ivy and Industry really gets into the 1980s much at all and I haven’t read his new one yet…

yep, I think you’re right. While I would defend my stance on 80s, which ultimately comes down to defending a less reductionist theory of university history than that propounded by university policymakers, I agree that even the ostensibly critical branches of the humanities are far from exterior to the large sums of money that support rich universities or to the institutional politics that make these large capital accumulations possible. The Yale group of deconstructive critics was after all at Yale. I don’t feel like I really understand what you call this ‘instrumental relation’ in any detail, though… a really really interesting piece of historical/ethnographic research would focus on the rise of critical theorists to high institutional positions in the U.S. academy. If I ever have time to pursue it, I would really like to do that project, actually.

I didn’t know that Bayh-Dole was a product of US anxieties about Japan. Does Newfield talk about that in his book? Anyway, it’s interesting to find out that the phantoms of foreign economic or economic dominance can be so symmetrical — it strikes me as quite ironic that Bayh-Dole, itself apparently prompted by U.S. anxieties about Japan, can turn around to become the instrument seized on in Japan to alleviate national anxieties about the U.S. or at least about its own place in the economic world. Or for another example, much European discussion about universities is based on a phantasmatic view of the “American university model,” but these European reforms may now themselves become models for new American reforms… if this is a historical logic, it’s an oddly nested one.

Do you have any other thoughts about symbols of corporatization and money power in relation to crisis? I guess this would be a good thing to think more about, which I haven’t, actually. I wonder if less entrepreneurial, business-oriented models of the university is getting mobilized in California now that times are tough. I could see there being pressure to fall back on more traditional notions of the university in such moments. But so far I’ve only seen a couple of radical documents, not necessarily representative…

Bayh Dole’s inception was in U.S. anxieties over the rise of Japan’s technological dominance in the late 1970s and 1980. “The Bayh-Dole university” is, of course, an abstraction, but what does it mean that this particular abstraction, with all its ideological contradictions, gains such traction in Japan, the original legislation’s orientalized bogeyman, the spectre mobilized by lobbyists and their allies in congress to push the legislation through in the first place. Your aside in the penultimate paragraph about how symbols of corporatization and money power shift in relation to spectacular crises, etc, seems really key to me.