Accretion, Revenues, and Costs
Accretion, Academic Administration, and Higher Education Politics
Management as Science and Art
Administration as Threat to Academic Culture
Administration as Parkinsonian
The Structural Alternative
Implications for Shared Governance
Accretion and Academic Stratification
Institutional Prestige
Multicampus Systems and Stratification
Prestige Among Disciplines
3.Contemporary Trends: Diagnoses and Conditional Predictions
An Unprecedented Perfect Storm
Unproductive Paradoxes: Starvation, Accountability, and Governance
General Consequences of Shifts in Support and Costs
Accountability, Governance, and Support
The Many Faces of Commercialization
The Language and Imagery of Corporatism and Its Consequences
Student Consumerism
Economizing as a Way of Life
University-Industry Relations
Online Distance Instruction and the Rise of the For-Profits
Nontenured and Part-Time Faculty
Implications for Tenure
Excursus on Academic Freedom
Coda
References
Index
Acknowledgments
I send thanks and bouquets to the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley—sponsors of the Clark Kerr Lectures—both for doing me the honor of selecting me in the first place and for facilitating all my preparatory efforts for the lectures. Jud King, director of the center, was supportive and helpful both formally and informally, as was John Douglass, senior research fellow. Rondi Phillips, staff member at the center, gracefully handled all logistics, right up to the point of equipping me properly with microphones at the lectures. Steven Brint, fellow sociologist and vice provost for undergraduate education at UC Riverside, guaranteed that my delivery of the third lecture on that campus was a successful occasion. I would also like to thank Ziza Delgado, my long-standing and flawless research assistant, for locating and interpreting empirical materials on selected trends in higher education. The staff of the Education-Psychology Library on the Berkeley campus was, as always, cheerfully accommodating in my bibliographical searching. Finally, I am most grateful to colleagues, friends, and curious others for coming to my lectures in impressive numbers, for their evident interest in what I had to say, and for helping me with apt and sophisticated questions and observations after each lecture.
ONEDynamics 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