The Societal Culture of University Knowledge

• In Event: 1122 - Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (100 min): Table 19: Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

The university and its knowledge system infiltrate every domain of contemporary life. Just as university-certified personnel populate the elites of the modern system, university-defined knowledge makes up much of the system’s legitimated cultural contents. Thus the teaching and research topics carried by the university expand dramatically. And they are by no means organizationally contained. University knowledge is institutionalized in society, and comes to be ubiquitous in everyday life, far beyond the walls of the university organizations. It permeates the economy, polity, family, and so on, and in the course of doing so, its authority grows increasingly dominant, over the high and hyper-modern periods of the last half-century.

Academic knowledge is distinguished first by its universalism. Particulars are routinely considered, but not as in themselves particular: they are seen as instances of more general truths and examined in that light. Second, academic knowledge is distinguished by its rationalism. It steps beyond roses-are-red-and-violets-are-blue description to analyze and deconstruct mysteries.

We develop these themes in the first section of this paper, and then turn to the expansion of academic knowledge. We proceed as follows:
-- First, we discuss the nature of academic knowledge, stressing above all its universalistic and rationalistic properties;
-- Second, we discuss the worldwide expansion and triumph of academic knowledge throughout everyday life;
-- Third, we discuss the worldwide expansion of academic knowledge within the university proper, i.e., its teaching and research curriculum;
-- Fourth, we discuss the expanding bases for academic knowledge, including the reconstruction of existing matter and the construction of new matter;
-- Fifth, we discuss the hyper-curriculum that emerges from this new world of academic understandings, above and beyond material reality.

Authors

• David John Frank, University of California-Irvine

• John W. Meyer, Stanford University