For the past several decades, the role of higher education as a public and/or private good in United States (US) society has been a matter of significant discussion and debate in research and policy communities (Kezar, 2004; Kezar et al., 2005; McMahon, 2009; Pasque, 2010). This discussion often focuses on the question of funding higher education: if the institution is primarily a private good for those who obtain degrees, then it should be funded by those individuals; if it is primarily a public good that benefits most or all of US society, then it should be funded publicly through taxation (Kezar, 2004; Kezar et al., 2005; McMahon, 2009). Most who participate in this debate acknowledge that higher education produces a variety of public and private goods, and accordingly it is funded through a mixture of public and private revenue sources. There has been a significant shift over the past fifty years, from thinking of higher education in the US as primarily a public good, toward thinking of it as primarily a private good (Gildersleeve, et al., 2010; Giroux, 2014; Kezar, 2004; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). This study explores the role of academic libraries and librarians in mediating the relationship between higher education and society. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to understand academic librarians' role in producing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge as a public and/or private good within a policy and organizational environment that emphasizes private good. The theory of academic capitalism is used as a theoretical framework in the design of this study and the analysis of data. This theory argues that universities are actively restructuring around knowledge as a private good that can be monetized to generate revenue, and is used to explore how these changes impact the internal organizational environment of universities as well as the connections between higher education and society (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). This study uses a qualitative comparative case design to investigate these how academic libraries in research universities are responding to academic capitalism, analyzing libraries at two research universities, as well as the Association of Research Libraries, an association of research libraries in the US and Canada. I constructed three themes from the data analyzed for this study. Academic research libraries are not restructuring around valuing knowledge as a private good. To the contrary, librarians seek to create new practices and new policies that reduce barriers to public access to scholarly knowledge, for both financial and ideological reasons. Unlike many other university units, libraries view the general public as an important constituent for their work, and this is reflected in their practice and rhetoric in a variety of ways. However, I found that academic librarians' approach to working with the general public varied based on institutional mission. Finally, academic librarians are actively building new infrastructure designed to manage scholarly knowledge as a public good. However, they face significant barriers to building this infrastructure due to the influence of the for-profit publishing and educational technology industries in higher education. Academic libraries in research universities serve as sites of communal ownership of knowledge and bear the costs of ensuring public access to scholarly knowledge. At the same time, academic libraries serve as sites of wealth transfer from higher education to for-profit industries. Librarians experience these combined social functions as a financial crisis, and they are responding by building new infrastructure designed to reduce the influence of these industries on higher education in order to reduce the cost of disseminating knowledge as a public good. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]