Dynamics of the Contemporary University. Neil J. Smelser

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: