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.