The University: Exalted Institution and Ruined Organization

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Expansion of Higher Education

Abstract

The university has prospered over nearly a thousand years, growing from a tiny outcrop between church and state into a great global behemoth. Even as it has flourished, the university has been shadowed by relentless attacks. We seek here to explain the seeming paradox. Our starting point is a distinction between institution and organizations. The university institution is defined by religious-like cultural commitments to the comprehensibility of the universe and the comprehending capacities of the humans within it; university organizations represent manifestations of those commitments in the real world. The institution is buffered from attacks: it shares its core commitments with modern Western and now world society, and its claims transcend scuffles with everyday forms of understanding. University organizations are exposed to attacks: each instance of the great institution fails to fulfill its magnificent promises, especially as those promises aggrandize over time. The attacks highlight the gulf between myth and reality, clustering around students and professors, research and teaching. But they are often hyperbolic in tone, as a series of exhibits from Europe and the U.S. over several centuries shows. The exhibits underscore two main themes: attacks focus on concrete instances of organizational failure, not on the overall institution of the university; and attacks focus on those aspects of university organization that link most directly to the great institution, i.e., the human and organizational sediments of knowledge. The exhibits furthermore suggest common determinants of attack — grand claims, lax standards, and multitudinous interpreters. Altogether, the attacks convey a profound sense of crisis; but one by one, they reveal exaggeration and embellishment. Notwithstanding its millennium in the sun, the university as an institution is not unstoppable. It has been challenged before in times of revolution, and its triumph is contingent on the endurance and extension of the Western cultural mantle. Were that mantle to crumble — as may be happening now — the thunder of attacks might be the clamorous prelude to the silence of demise.

Authors

• David John Frank, University of California-Irvine

• Daniel Scott Smith, Duke University

• John W. Meyer, Stanford University