Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (review)

Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is a brilliantly conceived and astonishingly erudite book. Clark deploys two large sociological concepts—charisma and cameralism—to frame the path from the late medieval university to the emergence of the German research university. He looks closely at change in material practices or, one might otherwise say, the everyday practices of university life, to tease out the pattern of change over a long period of time. One cannot but notice the early emergence of both defining characteristics and odd ticks of the contemporary academy. Because neither of Clark's controlling concepts is sharply defined, however, the strong logic underlying the project is too often lost in a mass of details. It could have been a much better and shorter book had Clark exercised more rigor in blending historical materials and social theory and more discipline in the writing. It would also have benefited from less abstract language and jargon. The significance of the seminar, one of the key developments that he tracks, is phrased thus: "The German research seminar was an institutionalized technique for the formation of normalized but individualized academic personae" (181).

In short, this book is heavy going, but it is also rewarding. In great detail, Clark shows a series of cumulatively transformative shifts. Broadly speaking, he describes the evolution of a medieval juridical/ecclesiastical institution to a modern political-economic one. As this terminology suggests, he integrates the emergence of the modern university into the story of capitalism (or the particular quasi-administered form denoted "cameralism") and bureaucratization. Moreover, "like modern capitalism," he writes, "the research university" cultivated "charismatic figures within a broader sphere of rationalization" (14). More particularly, he shows how examinations evolved from disputation to more informal and spontaneous (compared to medieval, not to our, standards) intellectual exchange, how academic communication moved from orality to writing and ultimately to dissertations, and how formal grading and ranking (responding, in his view, to bureaucratic imperative) came to shape academic life. He also examines at chapter length changes in or the emergence of the lecture catalog, disputation, examinations, the seminar, the Ph.D., the appointment of professors, and the library catalog.

One of the particular strengths of the book derives from the comparisons that Clark makes between the Protestant German system; the English "collegiate" system, which did not evolve into the research university until the twentieth century; and the Jesuit system, which remains collegiate but achieves a meritocratic and bureaucratic efficiency not matched by either of the other two. These comparisons usefully complicate the absolute linearity in too many traditional to modern stories. Since Clark does not propose total transformation, the modern university seems to carry some of its past. It is not wholly modernized or routinized; it is a mixed institution, making it (fortunately) impossible to manage fully, whether by market mechanisms or bureaucracy.

Though a long book, there are many things that Clark declines to address, at some cost. For all of his theoretical sophistication, he seems not interested in theories of causal explanation; the account is descriptive—and richly so—with little attention to the why question. Not unrelated, the story is entirely internal. The social, political, or intellectual contexts beyond the university and state educational bureaucracy do not find a place in this story.

The book raises a final question about method that other books have raised as well. In the past few years, several major interdisciplinary books have dealt with the development in of new genres (novel) or the production of knowledge (natural and social) in the early modern period. Though obviously historical, they are not works of card-carrying historians; they are in a broad sense historical sociology. The strength in all cases is a powerful theoretical idea, with questions more inventive than those asked by narrative historians. The weakness is the proliferation of facts, stories, episodes too many of which are not—or cannot be—effectively deployed to enrich or verify...