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ОглавлениеONEDynamics of American Universities
It is a custom on this occasion to honor the figure for whom these lectures are named and to acknowledge how deeply honored I am to have been chosen to deliver them. I do both these things, not out of the pressure of ceremony, but from the heart. Clark Kerr was (and is) such an important part of my own career that I must add a personal note.
I met Clark Kerr in 1958, about two weeks after I arrived on the Berkeley campus as a new assistant professor. He, as new President, and Glenn Seaborg, as new Chancellor, had invited faculty appointees to a welcoming social occasion. We merely shook hands at the time, and to him I was a face in the crowd, but I knew of his heroics in the loyalty-oath crisis years earlier. I could not have known that in the coming decade he would lead California into its magnificent Master Plan, enunciate his historic conception of the multiversity, ride herd over multiple crises in the 1960s, establish his presidency as a legendary one, and become the century’s leading spokesman for higher education.
In the following decade I myself was drawn into campus affairs in such a way that Kerr came to notice me, and he invited me to join the Technical Advisory Committee of his Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. There I, along with Martin Trow, Sheldon Rothblatt, Bud Cheit, and Fred Balderston, came to constitute a group that I called “Clark’s boys.” My relationship with Clark was cemented in those years, and he sought my advice on diverse matters, and ultimately my help with his memoirs. Clark Kerr and I would meet in the Clark Kerr Room of the Men’s Faculty Club, sit under the portrait of Clark Kerr, and I would always order the Clark Kerr Special from the menu, even when I didn’t like the plate. It was a humbling honor when Clark invited me to write the foreward to The Gold and the Blue (Kerr 2001; Kerr 2003) from a crowd of much more visible and notable candidates. I apologize for this too-personal introduction, but I felt it important to reveal the depth of memories and feelings I have on this occasion.
APOLOGIA
I now offer another apology, this on how I am going to proceed. In covering the recent literature on higher education, reading the press, and conversing with colleagues and friends, I get a picture of urgency and crisis. We are being starved by the public and the politicians, tenure is disappearing with the proletarianization of the academic labor force, the idea of the university is being eroded by the forces of the market and corporatization, and we are being threatened by the spectacular growth of online, for-profit organizations of questionable quality.
I know these questions are on your minds as well, and I feel the pressure to put my two cents’ worth on these overwhelming issues right away. In the context of such urgency, it is almost a matter for personal guilt if I don’t. I can assure you that I will comment, but not right away, not from the hip, and not in the language of the day. If I did so, I am confident I would add nothing to the babble of voices. As an alternative, I am going to try to elucidate a few first principles about the nature of higher education (especially the university), particularly about its change and stability. So, in the first chapter I will develop some principles about change in higher education, using historical and contemporary examples. In the second I will trace some of the endless ramifications of these principles. And in the third—using the foregoing analyses—I will develop assessments and conditional predictions about higher education’s major contemporary problems as they are superimposed on its structural history.
One final apology: my academic career has been that of a social scientist, or more precisely a sociologist afflicted with an incurable interdisciplinary impulse. I have also had a lifetime of immersion in my university’s departmental, administrative, and academic senate affairs. Such diversity of experience often produces eclectic, contingent outlooks. But here my approach will be primarily that of a sociologist. In particular, I will be guided by the idea of a social system. This stress has weakened in the social sciences in the past several decades, along with the atrophy of interest in social theory in general, but it is clearly relevant to the study of higher education. Elsewhere I have argued (Smelser 2001: xx-xxi) that some of Clark Kerr’s extraordinary success as chancellor and president could be assigned to his understanding of the “systemness” of his university—the intricate relations among its many parts and its relations to its environments.
By “system” I mean an entity with identifiable but interrelated parts, such that changes in one part influence the other parts and the entity as a whole. The campus-based college or university, with its departments, schools, layers of administration, and support systems—to say nothing of its array of internal constituencies—is surely a system. So is a multicampus system, though perhaps in a looser sense. And so is higher education as a whole, with its differentiated segments and types of institutions. The notion of open system gives importance to forces external to it. The idea of system also equips one with tools to analyze the ramifications of discrete changes and their consequences. Finally, a system perspective permits us to generate new insights about many murkier, evasive aspects of our history and our contemporary situation. In addition to this stress, I will make extensive use of the concepts of culture (including subculture), social structure, and groups and group conflict, all standard items in the sociological repertoire. Finally, however, to understand higher education and its dynamics, one must—and I will—selectively bring in tools and insights from economics, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.
I might cite a final advantage of thinking systemically about higher education. We know so much and we say so much about the characteristics, the history, the nature, and the problems of higher education that our minds are in danger of being overloaded. We academics are great observers, talkers, writers, and worriers; our stock-in-trade is words and insights. This brings to mind the anecdote about a committee meeting at which the chair confidently states that he thinks the group has come to closure on an issue, but one committee member objects and says, “But we haven’t said everything that’s ever been said on the subject.” I do not threaten to do that, but by appealing to the idea of system I hope modestly to make a few new connections between known or asserted things. Why, for example, is it that higher education is simultaneously known to be an institution with a history of spectacular growth and solid institutionalization and simultaneously proclaimed to be in crisis or doomed (Birnbaum and Shushok 2001)? Why are our universities so admired and emulated abroad and so bashed within our boundaries? Why are universities and kindred institutions, so splendid and serene in hope and theory, also fraught with internal ambivalence and group conflict? In these chapters I hope to make some sense of these and other questions.
WHAT KIND OF CREATURE IS HIGHER EDUCATION?
I begin not with a formal definition of higher education but a listing of its most salient characteristics as a social institution—characteristics essential for the analysis presented in these chapters.
Functions
Describers, apologists, advocates, commentators, and historians of higher education often list a number of its functions, almost all positive. There is variation but some consensus on the following in the literature:
To preserve, create, advance and transmit knowledge to the young, who will be future professional, political, and business leaders of society.
To impart ranges of expertise to those who will be leaders.
To serve society more directly by providing useful knowledge for economic growth and prosperity, and community development (Trani and Holsworth 2010).
To foster individual achievement, social mobility, equality of opportunity, and social justice.
To serve democracy further by improving the literacy, knowledge, rationality, tolerance and fair-mindedness, and responsible participation on the part of citizens. This has served as a main buttressing argument for liberal and general education.
To preserve, develop, and augment the general cultural values of our civilization, both by cultivating those values among the young and honing of them through constant and responsible criticism.
At a different level, to come to the assistance of the nation in its vital struggles—for example, wars, international political competition, and heightened economic competition associated with globalization (Duderstadt 2000).
The Problematic Status of “Functions”
This list is fair enough. However, I have come to regard this kind of presentation as problematical in some respects. I list my reservations:
The exact conceptual status of these activities as “functions” is unclear. They may be regarded as descriptions of what institutions accomplish; they may be regarded as ideals or goals for which they strive but attain only partially; they may be regarded as a source of cultural legitimacy for institutions of higher education, which, like all institutions, require such legitimacy to secure their place, their support, and their continuity in society; or finally and more cynically, they may be regarded as a form of advocacy—namely, as claims to prestige and status, ploys in seeking support, or intellectualized defenses by spokesman in institutions under attack. They are all these things, of course, but the multiple connotations make for ambiguity and perhaps conflict with respect to the status and meaning of the claimed functions.
Insofar as they are claimed to describe what educational institutions do, they involve causal claims—that is to say, usually implicit assertions that certain lines of activity (teaching, conducting research, advising governments) actually have the intended, usually positive effects. These claims are difficult if not impossible to establish definitively or scientifically. All that we know from evaluation research on “results of schooling,” “educational impact,” and the general relations between knowledge and policy demonstrates that multiple variables are at work and that it is extremely difficult to establish reliable relationships between intervention and outcome, even though elaborate quasi-experimental efforts to control the effects of contaminating variables are made (Rossi and Freeman 1992).
It follows that there is inevitably a residue of generalized faith that the activities of institutions of higher education are fulfilling their functions adequately or fully. Moreover, this faith usually is not automatically granted and therefore rests on shakier grounds than in other areas (health, protecting the nation, and sufficiency in agriculture) in which the goals are matters of vital importance and high consensus.
As a result of these difficulties in describing abstract functions, I am going to view the “functions” of higher education more concretely and historically—namely, as sequence of “compacts” between agencies outside those institutions (states, the federal government, philanthropists and donors, interested commercial and industrial parties, and a real and imagined “public”). For example, Thelin concludes that “federal government support for higher education displays a distinctive characteristic: it often is a convenient means for the U.S. government to attain larger national goals” (2004b: 37). States are interested in the correlations between the proportion of their students enrolled in higher education and their rate of economic growth (Zumeta 2004)—even though the direction of causality may be questionable. Actually, the relationship is more complex; it is one of mutual opportunism. External persons or agencies perceive an opportunity, a belief that higher education is a valuable asset in pursuing one or more of their purposes, and educational institutions accept these offers opportunistically. Or, if they are more proactive, those institutions invent and seek out new functions as a way of enhancing their competitive position and survival.
The “compacts” emerging from these relationships are typically not strict contracts in the legal sense of goods or services being delivered for specific consideration. State governments expect that state colleges and universities will serve mainly the citizens of the state, and those institutions generally comply. Colleges and universities use philanthropic donations for designated purposes, but they resist conditions of regulation by donors, delivery of specific services, and guarantee of specific “outcomes.” Academic freedom is granted with implicit expectations that academics will not exploit the privilege or behave in uncivil ways. Correspondingly, these compacts have had mainly generalized expectations, unspoken assumptions, and trust.
We may say at this early moment, then, that even at the most fundamental level institutions of higher education, both in their functions and in their relations with external agencies, exhibit notable levels of ambiguity, nonspecificity, and taken-for-grantedness. In my estimation these have been great institutional advantages for colleges and universities, essential for their freedom, autonomy, and adaptability. Yet those very qualities of vagueness increase the probabilities of misunderstandings, disappointments, conflicts, ex post facto accusations of promises made but not kept, as well as recriminations and defenses against those recriminations. The functions I have identified—what society has asked of higher education—do not guarantee such outcomes, but they tilt the system in the direction of producing them.
Moral Embeddedness
Cutting across these functional linkages between higher education and society is one final fundamental characteristic. Education in general and higher education in particular are inevitably matters of moral concern. This is grounded in two circumstances. First, all education is directly involved in the institutionalization, reproduction, and transmission of the fundamental values of society to succeeding generations—always a moral matter. Second, the historical heritage of higher education is profoundly moral. From their medieval beginnings, its activities were indistinguishable from religious morality. This translated itself to the view of the university as a sacred entity, and, for its members, the idea that involvement in the university represented a higher religious calling. Even though most universities have been “de-churched” (Tuchman 2009) and are by now fully secular institutions, versions of the sacred, ecclesiastical hierarchy and the calling survive in recognizable form (see Brubacher 1978). Brint recently observed that “[e]ducation is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States” (2011: 2). In modern garb this includes the ideas that education’s work is of the highest value (example: “The university preserves and interprets the best of what human intelligence has created and written” [Hearn 2006: 160]); that that work demands love; and that educators should manifest a certain ascetic, antimaterialistic attitude (which conveys further that one should not want and/or become too involved in worldly rewards). These ideals are held, in variable form and strength, by those in the academy and as expectations for the academy on the part of those outside it. The three basic historical roles of higher education—teaching, search for knowledge, and service to society—are each endowed with the connotation that they are publicly valued missions. Part—but only part—of the claims of higher education to status, public support, and legitimacy is a matter of representing itself and being regarded by outsiders as a higher activity, no longer fully priestly but having some of those qualities and roles.
Three corollaries follow from the postulate that institutions of higher education are seats of claims to and recognition of high moral purpose:
First, claims to a morality (and special expertise) generate special and high expectations, both within the academy and in the larger public. If a class of activities is designated as special and superior, those practitioners of them are expected to live up to those standards. This has been a constant characteristic of priestly and quasi-priestly classes—the pressure to live up to their billing.
Second, on the basis of such claims, academic classes are typically granted high status and do not hesitate to accept and claim that status. Nor do they hesitate to grant others less status. Balderston argued that “administrative staff members, including those at professional and senior levels, cannot share directly in this [academic] status system and are, worse yet, sometimes the victims of academic snobbery and contempt for bureaucracy” (1974: 80). Duderstadt, himself a long-serving president in a leading university, commented simply that “[academic] arrogance knows no bounds” (2000: 123).
Third, an inevitable ingredient that accompanies claims to moral commitment, high expectations, and high status is that deviation from its standards is more than simple straying. It is tinged with the corruption of the sacred, and thus justifies strong moral reactions. Consistently, the preferred mode of reflecting and writing on colleges and universities has been one of morality and moral passion. Colleges and universities embody the highest of hopes and the greatest of despair, blame, and moral loss when these hopes seem to be compromised. That language is infused with the positive affects of love, admiration, and rhapsody and the negative affects of disappointment, betrayal, and outrage. With all this the stage is set for recurrent episodes of both idealization and vilification.
I hope that these general reflections will prove useful in enlightening the endemic conflicts that swirl around processes of change in academia (below, pp. 60-64). But I do not wish to press these observations too far and claim that the moral dimension is the sole or strongest ingredient of higher education; secular elements abound in academic culture. But it cannot be ignored as a heritage and a reality, and if we do not keep it in mind, we cannot understand what has transpired and is transpiring.
The peculiarities I have identified—functions, relations with society, and moral embeddedness—supply the context for the topics to which I now turn: growth and change in American higher education. In fact, that process of growth itself is a distinctive feature of higher education. But that growth, to be understood, has to be regarded in relation the heritage of societal involvement and moral embeddedness.
STRUCTURAL CHANGES ACCOMPANYING GROWTH
Growth has been the hallmark of American higher education in the past one and one-half centuries. This has been pulsating, to be sure, with periods of extremely rapid increase in, for example, the late nineteenth century and the two decades following World War II, as well as periods of stagnation such as Great Depression and the 1970s and 1980s. We will examine the causes and consequences of such irregularities as we go along, but initially we must clear some theoretical ground.
One way of tracking growth is by different quantitative indices—expenditures, numbers of students, faculty, graduates, and institutions. These reveal its magnitude. However, social scientists know that neither rapid nor long-term growth typically occurs without some qualitative changes in the social structures involved in that growth. The following are some typical structural processes.
Increasing the Size of Units
Much population growth—that associated with increases in fertility—occurs through the increasing size of families, among other changes. While this may entail changes in intrafamily dynamics, it does not directly produce structures other than the family. In higher education we observe the same principle—for example, in campus policies of expanding enrollment of students and size of faculty in the face of increasing demand. Increases in size typically create some economies of scale but sooner or later reach a limit and generate pressures for other kinds of structural change.
Segmentation of Units
Segmentation is a form of change that is also relatively simple in that it involves the increase of identical or similar units. It is another structural concomitant of population change—namely, the multiplication of family units without significant structural changes in family structure. Another example is an automobile manufacturer’s decision to increase the number of retail outlets in response to augmented demand. The rapid increase in numbers of four-year and community colleges between 1950 and 1970 is an example from higher education, as is the increase in numbers of for-profit distance-learning institutions in recent decades.
Differentiation
Differentiation is one of the most widespread structural concomitants of growth and efficiency. It is the principle in Adam Smith’s formula of the division of labor (specialization) leading to greater productivity and wealth—a formula he associated explicitly with growth. Whole institutions can also become more specialized as well. Much of the story of the Western family during the history of industrialization, for example, was its loss of functions as a productive economic unit (wage labor outside the family accomplished that), as a welfare system (the growth of public welfare accomplished that), as an instrumental training ground (mass primary and secondary education accomplished that), and as a principal agency for sustaining the aged (social-security systems accomplished that) (Ogburn and Nimkoff 1955). In the process the family become more specialized, responsible mainly for regulating intimacy and caring for and socializing young children. Specialization has also been the name of the game in education as well, resulting not only in the differentiation of primary, secondary, and tertiary forms but also in the proliferation of many types of different-purpose institutions, such as community colleges, vocational schools, four-year colleges vocational schools, and research universities. Some European and other systems have separated higher learning into universities and research academies.
Proliferation: Adding New Functions to Existing Structures
Expanding business firms add new departments or divisions to handle new functions (sales divisions for new regional markets, human relations departments, research-and-development divisions) as their operations expand. So do government bureaucracies. In higher education, an example is the creation of multiple curricula in community colleges to accommodate academic programs necessary for transfer to four-year institutions, terminal vocational degrees, and “preparation for life” courses (Brint and Karabel 1989). We will also discover that proliferation has been a favored strategy for universities as well, adding one function after another, with a peculiar twist. The obverse of proliferation is the shedding of functions, either outright or through downsizing or outsourcing.
Coordination: Dealing with the Consequences of Increased Scale and Structural Change
The impact of all the above structural processes, considered together, is to produce not only larger but also more complex structures with many more moving parts. We owe it to Durkheim ([1893] 1997) who insisted that increases in social complexity (division of labor) inevitably occasion the need for new kinds of integration in society. That principle has been discovered and rediscovered in organizational studies, politics and administration, and in studies of whole societies (see Simon 2001), to say nothing of the administration of campuses and the coordination of multicampus systems. Coordination encompasses new demands for routine management, for ensuring that the many hands of complex organizations know what the others are doing, and for anticipating, containing, and handling conflicts among differentiated units and groups. This final principle constitutes an important modification of any simple theory of economies of scale, because increases in scale of all types demand new structures, mechanisms, knowledge, and accompanying financial resources to deal with size and complexity.
I submit this classification of structural changes—increase in unit size, segmentation, differentiation, proliferation, and coordination—both as a set of tools for analyzing the kinds of changes experienced by higher education and as a key to understanding phenomena in those institutions that may be otherwise baffling. Two points will emerge: (a) the “choice” of directions of structural change is constrained by external restrictions and opportunities, and (b) the different kinds of social change ramify in different directions, and express themselves in distinctive anomalies and contradictions, status hierarchies, strategic adaptations, and patterns of competition and conflict. We simply cannot unravel these ramifications without understanding institutions’ structural situations.
A PECULIAR CASE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: STRUCTURAL ACCRETION
As the illustrations in the last section reveal, the history of higher education has revealed all the forms of structural change associated with growth. I would like to spend some time on a special form that involves growth, specialization, and proliferation, and applies mainly but not exclusively to universities. In search for a descriptive term, I have settled on the concept of “structural accretion,” a composite form of growth.* Its simple definition is incorporation of new functions over time without, however, shedding existing ones (deletion) or splitting into separate organizations. It is a complex process reflecting, in the main, the following driving forces:
Expanding as a result of new opportunities for activities, usually but not always relevant to the main missions of the university. Rosenzweig put the culture of growth simply: “The institutional impulse is not to restrain growth but to support it . . . Standing still . . . is contrary to the nature of the beast, and contraction is simply an abomination” (1998: 156).
The fact that most growth has been a matter of mutual opportunism—the belief on the part of external agencies that universities are an appropriate or effective place to invest resources in line with their own interests and purposes, and the dependence of universities mainly on external subsidization.
The power of academic competition and emulation in a highly stratified prestige hierarchy of institutions. Stadtman enunciated this as a principle: “the tendency for institutions to emulate the most prestigious, largest, and most secure colleges and universities” (1980: 95).
Organizational inertia, university politics, and the shortage of mechanisms to ensure the shedding of adopted activities.
The ingredients of accretion have been noted by observers of higher education. The accumulation of functions was captured fifty years ago by Clark Kerr’s (1963) invention of the term “multiversity,” connoting that accumulation. He also identified the inertial side by noting cryptically that “[c]hange comes through spawning the new than reforming the old” (Kerr 1963: 102). More recently Altbach observed that “[w]hen faced with new situations, the traditional institutions either adjust by adding functions without changing their basic character or create new divisions or institutes” (2001: 30). Diffusion through competitive copycatting has also been noted as a principle; “[institutions] build prestige by mimicking institutions that already have prestige” (Brewer, Gates, and Goldman 2002: 66). And faculty conservatism has been frequently identified as one of the most powerful forces in the academy (Kerr 1963); one critic speaks of “four hundred years of resistance to change in modes of instruction” (Marcus 2011: 41). Antagonism to change is a perhaps the most well-worn theme in academic humor. (Riddle: “What is more difficult to change than the course of history?” Answer: “A history course.” Riddle: “How many Oxford dons does it take to change a light bulb?” Answer: “Change?”). Over the years, moreover, faculties appear to have cultivated the art of resistance commensurate with their levels of intelligence and ingenuity. After a long season of entrepreneurial efforts of running his proposal to establish the Said Business School through faculty committees at Oxford, John Kay concluded that the committee system had elevated the avoidance of decision making into a high art form. He identified “eight oars of indecision”: deferral, referral, procedural objection, “the wider picture,” evasion, ambiguity, precedent, and denial (Kay 2000). Perhaps he could have discovered even more than eight had he not been constrained by the metaphor of the rowing shell.
Despite these observations, I know of no general statement that integrates all these ingredients, much less traces out the ramifications of the process into almost every aspect of university life. I undertake both those tasks in these lectures.
A Historical Sketch of the Process
Here is a very brief, idealized history of the cumulative accretion in universities:
In the colonial period and through the early nineteenth century, institutions taught and trained elite classes through the baccalaureate degree or its equivalents.
Dramatized by Yale’s introduction of the Ph.D. in 1860, universities consolidated postgraduate training during the last half of the nineteenth century, without, however, surrendering undergraduate studies.
Also in the same period, professional schools of law and medicine were introduced as adjuncts to universities (Kimball 2009), and the list of professions served increased over time to include the long list with which we are now familiar. With respect to schools of education, universities came to supplement the work of the normal schools and teachers’ colleges. This contrasted with the continued vitality of professional apprenticeship systems outside the universities in many other countries. Addition of professional education, however, did not result in the desertion of existing activities. They added to them and extended and intensified the “service to society and community” functions.
Concomitant with the growth of postgraduate education, universities aggressively introduced and gave high priority and prestige to Humboldt’s visions of research and created the academic department as the long-standing organizational venue for its execution. Over time, the number of departments has increased (e.g., the addition of the social sciences in the very late nineteenth century, and the addition of computer studies and communication studies in recent decades). So fundamental were these additions that by 1905 Abraham Flexner could declare that “the university has sacrificed the college at the altar of research” (quoted in Scarlett 2004: 39).More was to come. The philanthropic efforts of foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the federal government in the Vannevar Bush and post-Sputnik eras, expanded scientific research in universities to unprecedented heights. This spilled over in lesser degree to the social sciences and more negligibly into the humanities. As structural manifestations of expansion, we find campuses honeycombed with centers and institutes—called organized research units—that are often interdisciplinary and structurally separated from academic departments. Reflecting the increased role of government, many institutions of higher education developed “government relations” offices to keep contact and lobby with relevant agencies (McMillen 2010). Yet we also kept and expanded undergraduate, graduate, and professional education.
The most recent phase (over the past thirty years) has seen the growth of sponsored and collaborative research with business organizations, sponsored research, collaborative research, and spin-off enterprises with faculty leadership. This also fits the pattern of accretion, and later we will treat the topic more fully, along with other “invasions” of commercial forces into campuses.
Over time colleges and universities have expanded into international education, beginning with standard “junior year abroad” programs but recently becoming more diversified and extended into postgraduate and research activities—all part of the rapid globalization of higher education.
As adjuncts to the standard baccalaureate programs, colleges and universities extended into the areas of correspondence courses, summer schools, workshops, and so on, to serve regular students who wanted to accelerate their progress or repeat flunked courses, professionals to improve their certification, and more mature students generally. Most colleges and universities tried to make these programs self-financing; they were also an important wedge for the practice of hiring temporary and part-time faculty.
The most recent line of accretion in this family (along with the differentiation of private teaching institutions separate from the residentially based institution) is “distance learning,” a huge and ill-understood series of changes, which Gregorian and Martin identified as the most important trend in higher education (2004). We only note this in the context of “accretion” at the moment and consider it separately later.
From time to time universities have embedded more traditional “intimate” collegiate programs into their larger, department-dominated programs of “majors.” I have in mind the Monteith College at the University of Michigan, and the Tussman and Muscatine experiments on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as many less conspicuous interdisciplinary programs. Historically, these enterprises have proved to be vulnerable, largely because, unlike departments and other units, they are typically financed on a year-by-year basis and subject to discontinuation, and they rely on faculty who make requests for reduction of departmental teaching commitments in order to participate—requests that are not welcomed by department chairs.
Over time colleges and universities added public entertainment (mainly in the form of intercollegiate athletic contests) and cultural enlightenment (museums, public lectures, dramatic and musical performances). Intercollegiate athletics is regarded by many as a cancer rather than an accretion, out of control because of pressures from alumni, media, and public love of competitive sports (below, pp. 93-94). With these also came intramural athletics and departments and programs of physical education, which, while often drawing faculty ridicule for having no place in academic institutions, persisted and grew all the same. These ancillary activities were also added to the institutions’ other ongoing activities.
Universities added academic presses as an avenue both for faculty publication of scholarly research (increasingly salient for tenure-track faculty members requiring evidence of such research as the most important ingredient for their professional advancement) and as a further instrument for cultural enlightenment of the public.
Offices for Institutional Research have become common installations, providing the databases and analyses for the multiplicity of functions and complexity of decision making in complex organizations (Swing 2009) as well as public relations activities.
Typically, universities and some colleges fashion accretions that are designed to create, consolidate, or produce other accretions. I have in mind fund-raising and development offices, campaign committees, alumni-relations offices, sponsored research offices, and technology-transfer offices. I could only experience a sense of irony when I came across a number of “advisory points” in a handbook on fund-raising for presidents: Appoint an extraordinary vice president for development with “an impressive office near yours” and membership on your top advisory council. Appoint a fund-raising consultant. Also, start a personal fund-raising library, conduct a feasibility study, and develop a case statement. Finally, “approve a budgetary allocation that is more than you are initially inclined to grant” [!] (Fisher 1994: 16).
Social movements and other public pressures have added irregularly to the accretion process. The most notable examples are the spread of academic programs and departments of women’s studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies in the wake of external and internal pressures associated with corresponding social movements. Also opposed by some faculty for not having a proper academic basis, these have nevertheless become standard features on many university and college campuses. Combined internal and external forces have most recently produced a growth of programs and departments in environmental studies.
Among the great paradoxes of administrative accretion is that all kinds of fortunes—both good and bad—provide motives for increasing it. In good times the motives seem self-evident. They call for increases in administrative staffs for newly forming research institutes; augmentation of counseling; financial aid and other student services; establishing and expanding sponsored research offices to capitalize on expanding opportunities; and beefing up development and fund-raising staffs to exploit expanding opportunities. Bad times would seem to call for shrinkage of administration, but it does not shrink. In the “new depression” (Cheit 1971) of the 1970s and 1980s, which involved shrinking enrollments and shrinking sources of support, the rate of growth of administrative personnel between the decade from 1975 and 1985 was 60 percent, while the growth of faculty was only 6 percent (Zemsky, Wegner, and Massey 2005). Why should a period of relative poverty call for such expansion? The main causes are increased pressures to gain a competitive edge in seeking students, securing financial aid, private gifts, and state support—all diminishing but, as a result, calling for greater investment in staff simultaneously to squeeze out what can be squeezed under the circumstances. Administering organizational cuts also calls for staff time in determining what these might be and how to deal with resistances to them. As a result of this paradox, there seems to be no time in the history of colleges and universities that does not call for some kinds of new administrative staff, whether to maximize gains or minimize losses.
Such are the major lines of structural accretions that have in the long run created the multiversity, or the distinctive American “bundle” referred to by Parsons (1973). The process has been realized mainly in the universities, largely because they are less constrained by law and tradition from expanding, and because external sponsoring agencies choose universities on account of their relatively unconstrained ability to take on new activities and because they are, by knowledge and reputation, “the best.” Donors, foundations, governments, and businesses prefer to choose “the best” to maximize the success of their own funding.
The accretion principle has also affected other segments of higher education, though less so than the universities, by mechanisms, as follows.
State colleges, many of them having evolved from teachers’ colleges, have had a long history of competition with and emulation of the state’s universities. This has taken the form of changing their names to “state universities”; striving for equity in teaching loads, salaries, and sabbatical relief; building research into their programs; and adding advanced degree programs (though most are excluded legally from offering the doctorate and some professional degrees). Many of these efforts involve adding programs and units, and thus constitute accretions. Status striving is the main engine: universities compete with one another for external sources as a means of expanding their activities, programs, and standing; state universities compete with universities to approach status equality. The long-standing striving of the polytechnics to gain parity with the universities in the United Kingdom is a conspicuous example from abroad.
Accretion in the community colleges is still another variant. As mainly public institutions they have traditionally been restricted to two-year degree programs (and prohibited from offering others), though some have succeeded in converting to four-year colleges, and many states now permit granting of baccalaureate degrees by community colleges—an accretion. Research at the community college level has been minimal. The main form of accretion has been curricular: continuing to offer preparatory liberal-arts transfer programs but expanding their curricula—typically in response to market opportunities and demands and the political influence of localities exercised directly and through governing boards—to offer more specialized vocational courses (Griffith and Connor 1994). The expansion of “preparation for life” courses without abandoning the other lines of instruction is a further example. Within each of three general categories, programs and units are added as demands or opportunities arise.
In addition to proliferation within organizations, the failure to abandon what has been added in the past is an essential ingredient of accretion. This is not a feature unique to educational institutions—organizational inertia is real and alive everywhere—but it is extreme in educational institutions, and it is important to understand why. I offer of the following considerations:
There exists no ready mechanism for “going out of business” in the academy, as is possible through the mechanism of failure in commercial markets. Public institutions traditionally have been recipients of annually appropriated block grants from state governments as their main financial support, with varying degrees of control over specific programs or units within them. State governments are reluctant to let the institutions they have formed go out of business; it is difficult to imagine any one of the fifty states of the union deciding to junk one of “their” institutions—much less, the flagship university of the state—rational though that may be on administrative or economic grounds. Legislatures meddle in the administration of their institutions, but they are reluctant to kill them. Private institutions are governed more autonomously, though governing boards have also been reluctant to shut them down unless extreme economic conditions make it absolutely necessary.
We must also point to the institution of academic tenure. Insofar as an academic unit involves tenured faculty as members, this constitutes a barrier to elimination. Tenure as an institution refers primarily to academic freedom, though over time it has accumulated the element of permanent job security. It is, in principle, legal and acceptable to terminate tenured faculty when units are eliminated (below, pp. 111-12). This occurs, but with great reluctance on the part of administrators, who either avoid the possibility or find places for tenured faculty in other units. The consequence is that “[tenure] inhibits managerial flexibility in moving faculty and changing academic institutions” (Rhoades 1998: 84). We will return to other aspects of academic tenure later.
A third reason arises from a set of social science axioms that apply especially to academic institutions. The logic is as follows: if you take on a new function, you must add new a new structure to perform it (an organized research unit, an administrative division, a special office); if you create a structure you also create a group of people to staff it; and if you create a group, you also create a new constituency, one which, typically, includes as one its primary interests its own survival and enhancement. By this logic the process of proliferation of functions also generates internal political constituencies. These press their interests through strategies of argument, influence, and stonewalling, mainly in budget-preparing and budget-renewing seasons. It is a final part of this axiomatic system that administrators, for reasons of political survival, tend not to go in for outright killing of units but to shave around the edges. In hard times you stop cutting the grass, but you don’t cut the faculty. Summarizing the patterns of cuts in the 1980s and 1990s, with many periods of budgetary adversity, Altbach cites the reluctance to alter drastically programs or priorities and instead to make broad, general cuts:[S]upport staff were eliminated and maintenance was deferred. A hiring freeze was put into place, salaries were frozen, and part-time teachers replaced full-time faculty. Libraries were unable to buy books, and journal collections were cut. Yet only a handful of colleges or universities violated the tenure of senior faculty. Departments were seldom eliminated, even where enrollments were low. Administrators tried to “protect the faculty,” even at the expense of rational planning or institutional development. A few of the weakest private colleges merged or closed. Virtually no public institutions were closed, even where campus closures or mergers would have been in the best interests of the statewide system. (2001: 34)
As an external advisor to Yale social sciences in the 1990s, I witnessed that university’s effort to eliminate, selectively, several “problematic” academic departments evolve first into a significant faculty revolt and then into the disappearance, through resignation, of three top administrators instead of the removal of several academic departments (for a brief account, see Rosenzweig 1998). On the other hand, recent history records some successful efforts to eliminate degree programs and departments, engineered with great dexterity (e.g., Kirwan 2006).
In the literature on higher education we do come across some talk of “unbundling,” but most suggestions deal with outsourcing or privatization of activities without perceived direct educational functions: campus food services, bookstores, operation of student health services, security services, and plant and utility infrastructures (Langenberg 1999). Duderstadt (2000) also mentions admissions, counseling, and certification as possibilities for unbundling. There is discussion and some activity in outsourcing subjects like introductory language instruction to community colleges and elsewhere—subjects already “outsourced” to some degree within institutions to temporary faculty and teaching assistants. The actual cost reductions realized by outsourcing are no doubt highly variable. More ambitious attempts to eliminate the lower division (freshman and sophomore years) of baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities have failed (for two efforts at Stanford, see Cuban 1999), partly because of sentimental attachment to the “four-year degree” as an institutional stamp, partly because of resistance of intercollegiate athletics and alumni, and, by now, also because of the fact that the lower division provides the major sources of “employment” for graduate student teaching assistants. In a word, the talk and activity of unbundling seems more to confirm the strength of the accretion-bundling complex than it does its reversal.
THE DISCIPLINE-BASED ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT: SO STRONG AND YET SO FRAIL
One part of the great transformation of American higher education from the Civil War to the first decades of the twentieth century was the increased specialization of knowledge, both within existing areas of inquiry and by the appearance of new areas. These specializations moved from more diffuse areas of inquiry into “disciplines,” connoting the production of knowledge on the basis of “disciplined” exploration of the subject matter by using an explicit and selective set of analytic assumptions and principles. These intellectual domains differed in rigor and completeness, and still do.
Irregularly but inevitably, the organizational embodiment of disciplines in the United States became the academic department, a largely autonomous subunit of faculty members in a discipline. This distinctive creation—Alain Touraine, the French sociologist, called the department “the great American invention” ([1974] 1997: 33)—had its origins and its cousins in European systems of “faculties,” but it evolved, with variations, as a more collegial and less authoritarian model than those cousins. The “chairman”—now “chair”—even in its strongest manifestations, never reached the dictatorial dimensions of the chief, single “professor” in the German and other systems.
Despite this looseness, the department accumulated power over time and became the principal institutional reality of universities and colleges. Its constant feature is a defined, annually renewed budget and career lines. Its responsibilities have fanned out. Departments are mainly responsible for collegiate and post-graduate curricula and who teaches them; most “majors” are named after disciplines and administered by departments. Future professionals receive their training in discipline-based departments. Their professional names—physicist, geneticist, anthropologist—derive from this training. They find employment in discipline-based departments, and if they have not been certified in department-based training programs, they are scarcely employable (who will hire a “natural scientist” or a “humanist” without further specification?). Advances in their careers (rank, tenure, pay increases) are initiated and largely controlled by departments, though this power is shared with the editors of journal and with publishers of books, as well research-granting agencies, whose decisions govern the main products on which academics are assessed (Bowen and Schwarz 2005). Together, the graduate training and employment systems form discrete labor markets for disciplines, more or less sealed off from other disciplinary markets. And not least, once established, academic departments are notoriously difficult to eliminate, as administrators have learned and know well; they are the quintessential accretions. The main budgetary victims in difficult, downsizing times are weaker experimental and interdisciplinary enterprises that lack the same structural and budgetary foundations. Departments can be squeezed but seldom strangled.
Other institutional arrangements more or less mirror this discipline/department core of colleges and universities. Most professional social scientists with the same disciplinary name are members of a national—and perhaps regional and international—association bearing the name of their disciplines: the American Political Science Association, for example. These associations act as status-protecting and status-enhancing groups and political lobbies. They hold annual meetings, which are simultaneously occasions for intellectual activity, recruitment, socializing, and ritual affirmation of identity and solidarity. Commercial and university publishers honor the disciplines by developing publication lists with disciplinary names—the psychology list, the history list, and so on. Governmental and foundation funders organize their giving in part by discipline-named programs and appoint program officers with disciplinary designations. Honorary and fellowship-awarding societies—such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation—organize their membership lists and categories of award giving along disciplinary lines.
Thus, discipline-based departments persist as the lifeblood and seat of vested interests in institutions of higher education. From a social-psychological point of view, the facts that professionals describe themselves by disciplinary label, find their homes, and carry out their roles in discipline-based departments and associations mean that part of their personal and collective identities will be couched in a disciplinary frame. Departments are the structural bases for what have been called academic tribes with distinctive cultures—in-groups that write to, for, and against one another and bear loves and hates for others (Becher 1989). In everyday life faculty members continuously remind themselves and others and are reminded by others that they have such an identity. The fact that this institutional and personal identity is so pervasive contributes to the idea that disciplines are reified and described as things in our discourse.
Despite all these sources of solidity, the discipline-based department presents a number of dilemmas and frailties that are not fully appreciated—largely, perhaps, because of the mentioned reification. I have noticed and reflected on these in my own career, and present them for your reflection:
The department as a force for expansion. The budget of departments is determined by a process of annual request and justification for faculty and staff positions, office costs, and other expenditures. The chair presents (or is presented with) a budget and may enter into a process of negotiation and adjudication with the administration. Expenses are controlled in this manner, but chairs, backed by their colleagues, exercise systematic pressure to expand or not be cut. One argument typically employed is that unless the department “covers the field” in teaching and research, it not only fails in its intellectual mission but also is also a lesser force in the national competitive arena. Relevant evidence: (a) Chairs of history departments are forever arguing, with fervor, that it is fatal for their entire program if Iberian history (or some other area) isn’t covered. Administrators are continuously bombarded with this logic. (b) Multidisciplinary departments feel less favored because they believe that, if they were distinct, they would fare better competitively and be in a better position to expand. Joint departments of sociology and anthropology live under this tension, even if latent. One source of the discontinuation of the famous Department of Social Relations at Harvard (1946-1970) was restlessness on the part of its psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, based on the feeling that if they existed as separate departments they could compete better for faculty and resources than in their three-in-one arrangement. (c) Those departments that choose the strategy of developing strength by concentrating in delimited areas—small group research or criminology, for example—are seen to hobble themselves by not being able to “cover the field” and offering first-class general graduate training. All these factors generate self-protective or expansionist tendencies.
The weakness of the chair. Given the “foreignness” of European dictatorial models, given the democratic thread in American society, and given the academic culture of “company of equals,” it was probably foreordained that the chair would be a comparatively powerless position. Though there are exceptions (e.g., chairs in medical schools), in general the chair is low on authority and high on persuasion, coddling, diplomacy, coordination, and conflict management (Gmelch and Miskin 1995). I served as chair of my department twice during my career, and from those assignments I emerged with a working definition: “A department chair is a person that spends 80 percent of his or her time running errands on behalf of disagreeable colleagues.” In retrospect I was wrong: 50 percent would be better, with 25 percent in dealing with factions and 25 percent in paperwork. Chairs carried much of the responsibility with respect to all aspects of affirmative action and subsequent diversification efforts. When I was chair I attended the annual meetings of sociology departmental chairs around the country; these gatherings tended to turn into group therapy sessions. I should add that departments with opportunities for external research funding experience an increase in individual faculty entrepreneurship and a decrease in collective faculty involvement in departmental life. Furthermore, the chair must continually negotiate with those researchers about teaching time to be bought off and deal with the chronic headaches of maintaining the department’s teaching commitments.While historically necessary and perhaps the best of worlds on balance, the chairmanship presents problems of weakness and tedium for incumbents and problems of motivation for potential incumbents. Many faculty regard it as an onerous distraction from more important work (mainly research), with the result that some of the most active and outstanding researchers make a career of avoiding the office. Correspondingly, some deans make a career of beating the bushes for willing and able people—and those not offensive to their colleagues—to take on the job.
Structure and culture of departments. It is in the nature of scientific and scholarly activity to fragment and spread over time as new discoveries are made, new lines and subtraditions of research develop, and new uses for knowledge become evident. New interdisciplinary initiatives flourish and hybrid fields are formed. Sometimes these are significant enough that they become the basis of additional structures—research programs, even departments such as astrophysics and neuroscience, or multidisciplinary organized research units. Sometimes bypassed fields, such as zoology or geography, partially disappear and are reabsorbed into other units.
Despite these organizational adjustments, I must point to the fundamental structural rigidity of departments. This persists in the natural sciences even with the flexibility I just noted. In the social sciences and the humanities the rigidity is striking, with almost no change in disciplinary-departmental designation since they were introduced into higher education in the late nineteenth century. Yet all these fields show a continuing intellectual process of extension, diversification, and fragmentation. This means that the new directions are absorbed under one departmental roof. The consequences are paradigmatic incoherence in disciplines, more specialization, less comprehension of the whole discipline by its own members, and more internal conflict over priorities in faculty appointments and teaching responsibilities. Even in economics, which boasts greater paradigmatic unity than its sister social sciences, recent history has seen innumerable new subfields and preoccupations—development economics, agency theory, new institutional economics, and above all behavioral economics. All these are absorbed as subthemes in economics departments, and some become subsections in the professional associations. The appearance of new schools of thought and new intellectual emphases are forever pushing to extend the process. And while the long-standing subfields may undergo change, they seldom disappear altogether. All this is good news in that it reflects intellectual dynamism, but it creates problems of integration and synthesis of knowledge.
I have referred to these dynamics as a contradiction between the rigidities of structure (the department) and the dynamics of culture (the discipline), which yields a picture of departmental overloading, competition and conflict over priorities, and disciplinary sprawl. This contradiction is a running sore that is continuously dealt with but seldom formally acknowledged.
The Organized Research Unit as Distraction from Departments
Laurence Veysey (1965: 338) noted that the basic structure of the modern university was set in the early twentieth century with the consolidation of the research impulse and the academic department. The only subsequent structural innovation, he noted in a side comment, was the system of research centers or institutions, and these were expressions of the augmented research impulse.
An organized research unit is a university structure separate from an academic department. It is usually established as a response to an interest on the part of an external agency (foundation or government), which offers resources for some line of research to be launched and carried out. A recent instance is the creation of a number of research institutes on the study of different facets of terrorism, sponsored and financed by the Department of Homeland Security. Institutes and centers have a faculty director and an assemblage of affiliated faculty members (usually interdisciplinary), a physical location on or near the campus, and a supporting infrastructure. These units also have developed a staying power almost as strong as departments. Their director and affiliates are constituencies, believe in and proclaim the legitimacy of their efforts, and resist efforts to discontinue them. In a word, they, too, are accretions.
From the perspective of the academic department, the many research units on campuses provide alternate homes and foci of identification for its members. Typically, though not always, their research grants are administered through organized research units; this includes recruiting and hiring research assistants. These units also often provide clerical and staff support that is more generous than that available in departments. Since they are more intellectually focused than departments, the faculty member may find that his or her interests mesh more comfortably with others in research units than they do with departmental colleagues. Research units are also the setting for working groups, seminars, colloquia, and conferences, though they do not offer formal courses. All this adds up to the fact that, in addition to being intellectual supplements to departments, research units are also competitors with departments for loci of research, time spent, and intellectual commitment. Aware of this, I once described the academic department as an emptying residual, a place where the chair negotiates over what and how much faculty teach, and an arena in which colleagues fight over who gets hired and who does not. Perhaps it is not too much to say that departments have been hollowed out as intellectual communities but retain vitality as political entities. These are oversimplifications at best, but they take note of the fact that academic departments and organized research units are in some respects at cross-purposes in the knowledge arena—a point whose extent and significance are not fully appreciated.
REACTIONS AND CONFLICTS ENDEMIC IN THE PROCESS OF ACCRETION
Numerous commentators have noted a paradox of extremes in American higher education. It experiences simultaneous love and hate. It is asserted to be the best in world but at the same time is assaulted on multiple fronts. Altbach observed that “at the same time that American academe has come in for unprecedented criticism at home, it is widely emulated abroad” (2001: 11). During the 1990s I served on an international body called the German-American Academic Council, composed of about two dozen scholars, civil servants, and political leaders from both countries. A consistent theme was that the German members could find much to praise about the American system (especially its political decentralization and competition among universities) and almost nothing to praise about their own. In the meantime, the American members appeared to be noncommittal about the German system but quick to criticize their own on many counts. This anomaly produced a number of dialogues between the deaf.
I would like to develop this anomaly—this theme of ambivalence—further. In doing so, I will first enunciate a little model that has served me well as a scholar of social change. It goes as follows.
Social change typically has both destructive and constructive aspects. Schumpeter’s (1934) notion of “creative destruction” captures the process. Industrial technology and its reorganization of the division of labor eliminated less efficient forms of production and introduced new ones. Computers replaced typewriters; cell phones crowd out landlines. The rise of democracy partially erased earlier forms of political life and established new principles of authority and political participation. Secularization eroded traditional religious cultures and ushered in new legitimizing cultural ideologies. This principle, while general, is usually not an all-or-none matter. Residues of past cultures and structures survive, and in some cases changes involve accretions—superimposing new arrangements on old ones. In all events, it seems inevitable from this double aspect that circumstantial change is greeted with ambivalence—both welcomed and resented. In addition, the human mind is sufficiently agile—or unruly, if you will—that one consequence of circumstantial change is that those affected by it select one side of this double aspect, generalize and extrapolate from it, and create runaway scenarios that result in predictions of both positive utopias (Pangloss) or negative ones (Cassandra).
To choose some general examples: film, radio, telephone, and television were hailed by some as world-shaking revolutions that would create a whole new world of efficiency in communication. Thomas Edison said in 1913 that with the invention of film “our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years” (quoted in Stokes 2011: 201). Others bemoaned their destruction of interpersonal intimacy and the end of confidentiality. Neither consequence was realized. The advent of radio and television brought predictions of the end of attendance at athletic events, and television promised the end of attendance at the movies. Early reactions to the computer crystallized into idealized views of the magic of the information society and predictions about the disappearance of meaningful social life (Streeter 2004). The e-mail and the Web have been proclaimed as both liberating and addictive. To choose more cosmic examples: Malthusian predictions of starvation and disaster accompanied the rosy glow of the idea of progress during the Industrial Revolution; Marxian predictions combined both a negative utopia (the excesses of capitalism) and a positive one (the perfection of communism) into one ideology. The darkness of environmental predictions of spoliation, destruction, and exhaustion are countered by scientific and economic arguments that new technologies will overcome the negative effects of old technologies. The lesson to be learned is that humans’ assessments of their own histories and situations include not only realism but also galloping extensions of absolutes to create imaginary worlds of both utopian bliss and Chicken Little disaster. This lesson should impart a note of caution if not distrust in those extreme predictions.
The social sciences themselves reveal a long history of the Panglossian-Cassandrian syndrome. Anyone familiar with the literatures of industrial and economic development, urbanization, and community life will find these dual tendencies—the one extreme basking in the effects of prosperity, urbanity, and human betterment, the other bemoaning the impoverishment, depersonalization, and injustices. Sensible scholars of these phenomena find mixtures of all those effects in complex patterns of change.
I submit that the history of higher education—perhaps education in general—has been especially productive of the Panglossian-Cassandrian syndrome. Clark Kerr made a partial reference to this phenomenon when he observed, from his own experience at celebratory occasions, “What I have come to experience are references to a glorious past and to a fearsome future” (Kerr 1963: 211). His remark caught a part of my analysis. What I want to do is to give a more complex account and to argue that it is inextricably mixed with the phenomenon of accretion I am stressing. Let me produce a few historical illustrations:
