Dynamics of the Contemporary University. Neil J. Smelser

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ