The American university generates some of the most influential ideas and policies on the planet. It is the product of culture-specific ideas and aspirations, as well as a long history of selective social exclusion, inclusion, and transformation. Yet most of us take for granted the culture-specific forms of reasoning, discourses, political loyalties, administrative practices, social relationships, and financial flows that constitute it. Through theoretical, historical, ethnographic, statistical, policy-oriented, novelistic, and journalistic accounts, we will de-naturalize and historicize the power/knowledge that not only forms us but also, in many ways, rules the world.