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The Organization of Knowledge
- University of Michigan Press
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The Organization of Knowledge In an age of abundant questions and scant resources, no university any longer pretends to teach all knowledge. Few even claim to provide an overview of the major divisions of knowledge. But in order to function at all, a university must have some system for organizing knowledge. Knowledge is of little use to anyone if it is amassed unsystematically and retrieved indiscriminately. The enormous and shifting masses ofinformation that accumulate unceasingly are unintelligible unless they are winnowed , sorted, and continuously rearranged to accommodate new material . As a university's faculty selects the subjects it emphasizes in teaching and research, it ineluctably imposes a de facto order on the eternally evolving universe of thought. As these individual and collective decisions are made daily and hourly, the permutations of their combined effects become more and more difficult to calculate. With each course they prepare, each reading list they compile, each departmental course requirement they approve, each examination committee they sit on, each candidate whose work they evaluate for appointment or tenure, faculty members are shaping the body of knowledge that will come down to those who follow. With each edition of the university catalog they produce, each library book they order-or cannot order-each budget recommendation they make, and each subject they choose for their next research or creative project , faculty members are helping to determine what will be remembered, what will be ignored, and what will be forgotten in times to come. Because academic governance is decentralized, it is not always possible to detect a comprehensive principle of organization. As the bold academic initiatives of one generation become the sterile orthodoxies of the next, only to be rediscovered as creative innovations by the generation that follows, faculties too often appear to have adopted the timeless principle of Mae West, who once said, "In deciding between two evils, I always pick the one I ain't tried yet." To a large extent, this impression of disarray is an illusion. The academic community does organize knowledge according to workable principles , but they cannot be expressed in simple prescriptions. That is 69 70 Idealism and Liberal Education because the ever-changing body of collective knowledge, like a living being, cannot be cast into a fixed and final form. As some branches of knowledge begin to bud, others are bursting into full flower, and still others are withering away. Some new programs strike root in fissures opened by the breakdown of exhausted systems of knowledge. Others arise in response to unanswered questions. And still others develop not from any internal educational logic but from the serendipitous presence of visionary faculty members or the beneficence of enthusiastic donors. And so, little by little, a pattern emerges. The university's course catalog becomes a way of defining the shape of knowledge itself, a vivid exemplar of what the faculty holds most valuable in the human experience, and perhaps the most influential of society'S models of the universe of thought. A university president sees an institution's struggle to organize knowledge from a uniquely comprehensive angle of vision. During the years in which I have served as a president of two very different institutions of higher education, I have developed a profound respect for the authority that faculty members hold as inheritors and custodians of the academic legacy that one generation bequeaths to the next. I have learned that, as academic institutions and disciplines evolve, unresolvable tensions must always attend the organization and reorganization of knowledge. I have sensed the precariousness of the equilibrium between order and transition that holds a university together. I have arrived at a more sober understanding of the difficulty, the complexity, and the serious consequences of the choices that faculties must make in striving to impose an organization on knowledge. In particular, I have come to see with increasing clarity that if academic decisions are unduly influenced by bureaucratic convenience, intramural power struggles, politically correct impulses, societal pressure to produce economically or socially beneficial results, or short-term ambitions , then faculties fail to take full responsibility for the organization of knowledge. And a failure to meet that responsibility means that a faculty will surely fail to pass on to its students a legacy commensurate with the one it received from its mentors. For all of these reasons, faculty members must shoulder a more conscious responsibility for the organization of knowledge and confront the need for crafting an open-ended system that allows for continuous accommodation and reevaluation...