How American universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles.

University Keywords gathers, contextualizes, and develops original understandings of 27 key terms that define the study and operation of the American university today. Editor Andy Hines and the book's contributors invite readers to rethink the university beyond its public image as a space of learning and understand how it also operates as a real estate powerhouse, a hedge fund, a debt machine, and even a crisis-producing entity embedded in the broader American economy.

Through essays written by over thirty contributors from a variety of disciplines, this book examines the university's intersecting functions, from its financial entanglements to its often-contradictory roles in society. Contributors illustrate how universities simultaneously link and separate communities—faculty, students, nurses, janitors, and the surrounding public—through administrative processes that promote a sense of isolation and division, even within shared spaces. By defining and expanding the terms that drive public and scholarly conversations about postsecondary education, University Keywords situates what appear to be auxiliary aspects of colleges and universities as directly impacting and at times displacing the central academic mission of these institutions.

In its role as a crucible for societal hierarchies and economic interests, the university both drives and reflects major shifts in social structure, labor practices, and economic power. The book's exploration of key terms like "debt," "police," and "union" offers readers a new framework for understanding the university's transformation into an instrument of capital accumulation, as well as its ongoing relevance in the fight for a world where education, labor, and social justice converge.

Andy Hines is the senior associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University.