Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion, and Conflict

1. Dynamics of American Universities

1 O N E Dynamics of American Universities It is a custom on this occasion to honor the figure for whom these lectures are named and to acknowledge how deeply honored I am to have been chosen to deliver them. I do both these things, not out of the pressure of ceremony, but from the heart. Clark Kerr was (and is) such an important part of my own career that I must add a personal note. I met Clark Kerr in 1958, about two weeks after I arrived on the Berkeley campus as a new assistant professor. He, as new President, and Glenn Seaborg, as new Chancellor, had invited faculty appointees to a welcoming social occasion. We merely shook hands at the time, and to him I was a face in the crowd, but I knew of his heroics in the loyalty-oath crisis years earlier. I could not have known that in the coming decade he would lead California into its magnificent Master Plan, enunciate his historic conception of the multiversity, ride herd over multiple crises in 2 c h a p t e r o n e the 1960s, establish his presidency as a legendary one, and become the century’s leading spokesman for higher education. In the following decade I myself was drawn into campus affairs in such a way that Kerr came to notice me, and he invited me to join the Technical Advisory Committee of his Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. There I, along with Martin Trow, Sheldon Rothblatt, Bud Cheit, and Fred Balderston, came to constitute a group that I called “Clark’s boys.” My relationship with Clark was cemented in those years, and he sought my advice on diverse matters, and ultimately my help with his memoirs. Clark Kerr and I would meet in the Clark Kerr Room of the Men’s Faculty Club, sit under the portrait of Clark Kerr, and I would always order the Clark Kerr Special from the menu, even when I didn’t like the plate. It was a humbling honor when Clark invited me to write the foreward to The Gold and the Blue (Kerr 2001; Kerr 2003) from a crowd of much more visible and notable candidates. I apologize for this too-personal introduction, but I felt it important to reveal the depth of memories and feelings I have on this occasion. a p o l o g i a I now offer another apology, this on how I am going to proceed. In covering the recent literature on higher education, reading the press, and conversing with colleagues and friends, I get a picture of urgency and crisis. We are being starved by the public and the politicians, tenure is disappearing with the proletarianization of the academic labor force, the idea of the university is being eroded by the forces of the market and corporatization, and we are being threatened by the spectacular growth of online, for-profit organizations of questionable quality. I know these questions are on your minds as well, and I feel the pressure to put my two cents’ worth on these overwhelming issues right away. In the context of such urgency, it is almost a matter for personal guilt if I don’t. I can assure you that I will comment, but not right away, not from the hip, and not in the language of the day. If I did so, I am confident I would add nothing to the babble of voices. As an alternative, I am going d y n a m i c s o f a m e r i c a n u n i v e r s i t i e s 3 to try to elucidate a few first principles about the nature of higher education (especially the university), particularly about its change and stability . So, in the first chapter I will develop some principles about change in higher education, using historical and contemporary examples. In the second I will trace some of the endless ramifications of these principles. And in the third—using the foregoing analyses—I will develop assessments and conditional predictions about higher education’s major contemporary problems as they are superimposed on its structural history. One final apology: my academic career has been that of a social scientist, or more precisely a sociologist afflicted with an incurable interdisciplinary impulse. I have also had a lifetime of immersion in...