In conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Emily Levine (Stanford University) discusses key ideas in her new book Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University. Allies and Rivals is a transatlantic monograph that draws on extensive historical research and applies sociological theory to study how the academic social contract was repeatedly renegotiated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conversation addresses the rise of modern research universities and its alternatives, questions of meritocracy and democracy, academic freedom and hard compromises, the global exchange of ideas and academic innovation in the twenty-first century.
