The last two decades have witnessed the development of a large and diverse body of research into the history of the American 1960s. As the baton has passed from erstwhile participants in the decade's political upheavals to younger historians with little or no personal memory of them, a series of methodological innovations has emerged. Kevin Mattson, Rick Perlstein, Doug Rossinow and Jeremi Suri, for example, have all pursued studies of left- and right-wing political activism that are firmly rooted in primary research, rather than the autobiographical reminiscence relied upon by their predecessors.Footnote ¹ Matthew Levin's new study of the postwar development of student politics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) falls squarely into this mode of scholarship, and documents both the continuities and discrepancies between the 1960s student experience in Madison and those in more familiar centres of upheaval, such as Berkeley and Columbia.

The central argument of Cold War University is that the most pointed target of student protest during the period was “the university itself,” with activists proceeding on the assumption that UW was complicit in the Cold War state's worst hypocrisies, from political repression and racial segregation to the development of nuclear weaponry and the Vietnam War (4). To demonstrate this thesis, Levin analyses the growth of unrest during the postwar years, a period in which UW, along with universities across the nation, saw a dramatic increase in student numbers. By tracing resistance to a range of on-campus manifestations of McCarthyism, he shows that no clear line can be drawn between the consensus of the 1950s and the controversies of the 1960s, before going on to emphasize the role of political ideas and the “intellectual community” in the development of the Madison New Left. In this latter respect, UW is of particular interest, given the prominence of irreverent faculty members such as the sociologist Hans Gerth and historians William Appleman Williams, George Mosse and Merle Curti (80–88). The intellectual ferment provided by these figures inspired the foundation of Studies on the Left, an influential student journal in which key issues were discussed and ideas disseminated (93). In subsequent chapters, the book traces the roots of the Madison New Left in the southern civil rights movement and concomitant struggles to desegregate campus accommodation, but ultimately returns to the link between the university and the Cold War by analysing the campaign launched in 1966 to sever UW's research and commercial ties with Dow Chemicals.

Levin recognizes that there were a variety of reasons for the growth of American higher education during the postwar period. Nonetheless, he tends to fall into the trap of describing UW as a Cold War monolith (39). For example, the author makes regular mention of Fred Harvey Harrington – a senior administrator throughout much of the Cold War and the institution's president between 1962 and 1970 – without providing a detailed consideration of the historian's sympathy with many aspects of the era's student protests. Before becoming president, Harrington's reputation was based on scholarship that was itself critical of US foreign policy, and his position at the centre of the UW system demonstrates the shortcomings of conceptualizing the institution as responsive to the pressures of the Cold War alone. Furthermore, Levin does not provide enough evidence to prove that student protestors themselves were engaged more with the question of the university's relation to society than with political controversies such as civil rights and Vietnam. It is therefore difficult to agree with him that the New Left emerged, whether in Madison or elsewhere, in categorical response to the politics of higher education, rather than out of a broader sense of anxiety about the state of American social and foreign policy (181).

Levin's is the first monograph to deal specifically with the development of the New Left at UW, and is a useful addition to scholarship because of this, but it does more to confirm the observations of a now well-established historiographical school of thought than to incite a fundamental rethink of 1960s student activism. This is no bad thing, and does not diminish the fact that the book is entertaining and engaging. However, it is difficult to imagine Cold War University rewarding the attention of readers with interests outside this specialized corner of American historiography, or of those who do not harbour a particular curiosity about UW itself.