The corporation is downsizing and going international. Government is being reinvented, even disinvented. Unions are disappearing. Churches are turning themselves into spiritual shopping malls, offering something for everyone. The family has fractured or recombined. Radical change is the order of the day in the life of American institutions--except in academia.
The corporation is downsizing and going international. Government is being reinvented, even disinvented. Unions are disappearing. Churches are turning themselves into spiritual shopping malls, offering something for everyone. The family has fractured or recombined. Radical change is the order of the day in the life of American institutions--except in academia. While other institutions tangle with whirlwinds, the university seems to be sailing along, impervious to the forces buffeting the rest of society. The institution run by and for a group that has been dubbed the 'tenured radicals" may be the most conservative institution in American society.
The last revolution to hit the American university was the one that brought the faculty to power half a century and more ago. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, note sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in The Academic Revolution, professors were pitted against university presidents and trustees in assorted campus battles over such matters as "the shape of the curriculum, the content of particular courses, or the use of particular books. The professors . . .lost most of the publicized battles, but they won the war." Their victory was sealed in the aftermath of World War I1 by the rapid growth of federal research grants, which made faculty members independent revenue raisers.
As the faculty took control, they established their own criteria for how higher education would operate: academic institutions would be meritocratic, national, secular, and professional. (The modern university, Jencks and Riesman add, also played a powerful role in spreading the meritocratic idea through the rest of American society.) Despite student protests, controversies over race-based admissions, efforts to rethink the role of religion in the public sphere, the tax revolt, and the shrinkage of the middle class, faculty control of the university has remained remarkably intact since Jencks and Riesman wrote their book.
To be sure, the higher education landscape is far from uniform. Faculty control varies with the status of the institution. Elite universities--the Ivies, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford, a few state universities, and about two dozen others--have little in common with Anne Arundel Community College, Hamline University, or Oklahoma Baptist University. When faculty members can make good on a threat to move elsewhere if their demands are ignored, they have considerably more power than when state legislators regard them as public employees little different from file clerks.
Some 833,000 people teach full or part-time at American institutions of higher learning, but only a minority enjoy the privilege of controlling their professional lives. Burton R. Clark, a higher education specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, estimates in Higher Learning in America that more than two-thirds of all professors teach in non-doctorate-granting institutions, including community colleges.
Still, at the top research universities virtually all challengers have with-drawn from the competition for control. Students, despite occasional flare-ups over political correctness and other matters, are politically quiescent, although one can hear rumblings around minority concerns. Trustees have demonstrated little interest in reasserting their authority. They believe that their obligation is to choose a president, give him or her occasional advice and money, and avoid "micromanagement" at all costs. Presidents, in the words of Donald Kennedy, who held that post at Stanford University from 1980 to '92, "are running for office every day." Needing to please everyone, they have scant incentive to confront faculty power, he notes in Higher Education Under Fire. The administration oversees admissions and erects buildings; the faculty retain authority over everything else that matters to them-tenure decisions, teaching loads, the lot.
Critics of the university have no doubt that faculty control is directly responsible for the institution's ills. During the 1960s, conservatives defended higher education against the attacks of the New Left. Now they delight in barbed criticism.