Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century (review)

As sociologists and using sociological theory to frame their work, David John Frank and Jay Gabler offer a new take on the more prevalent economic and political perspectives on globalization and its impact and relevance to higher education in their excellent new work, Reconstructing the University. As one who has focused the majority of my own academic work on higher education in an international and global perspective, I found this book absolutely engrossing and enlightening.

Even if the terminology/sociological jargon sometimes went a bit over my head, the concepts never did. This is an accessible but most definitely academic investigation of the global evolution of the university in the 20th century, and it is a worthy read for anyone interested in understanding the environmental context in which universities operate around the world.

The book opens with a well-developed and thorough introduction, and the authors do an admirable job of setting the stage, in relatively accessible terms, for the theoretical arguments and analysis that follow in the chapters. Focusing on the most basic purposes of the university—teaching and research—along with the cultural significance of individual nations' higher education systems, Frank and Gabler convincingly establish their thesis for the book: that universities in the 20th century began increasingly to move away from a domestic—or even a campus-level organizational model—toward a more universal, globally uniform structure, regardless of locale.

In particular, Frank and Gabler set out to offer an alternative to two major explanations for structural changes in the university: (a) the idea of the academic pursuit being one of seeking enlightenment—progress made in the search for an absolute truth, and (b) the pervasive functionalist explanation for the "reshuffling of university priorities" (p. 3), which holds that the changes are purposeful adaptive responses to the student/faculty market for higher education services. Frank and Gabler convincingly establish the weakness and shortsightedness of these two theories by offering their own—a global-institutional (world-society), sociologically based theory, which focuses on the global cultural models that influence organizations and individuals regardless of national borders.

Frank and Gabler present examples of broad and universal shifts within each area, by and large regardless of the national location of the university. They distribute their analysis among the three main branches of learning within university divisions—humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (chaps. 2–4). Describing examples from such diverse institutions as the University of Tokyo, Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Boston College, and University College of Ibadan, Nigeria, the authors introduce specific and truly fascinating data—qualitative and quantitative—on how departments and faculties endured relatively similar and consistent shifts in their focus and operations during the 20th century, almost regardless of their indigenous cultural contexts. This finding alone makes this book entirely worth reading.

There is no shortage of literature on the marketization of higher education and its impact on academic subject diversity on campus. The loss of philosophy, classics, and chemistry departments, for example, has been lamented on many occasions on campuses and in the higher education press, particularly in North America and Western Europe. In much of the debate, the functionalist explanations for the disappearance of these subjects (low student enrollments, lack of direct applicability to the job market) have remained largely assumed and accepted. Frank and Gabler make a convincing and more palatable counter-argument, one that has truly affected my own understanding of how global forces work in higher education.

What if subjects are not disappearing because of a lack of concern for or interest in academic continuity, because of the polluting of the once-pure academic mission of the search for enlightenment and truth, or because of the dollar-driven demands of students who are no longer interested in developing their minds as much as their resumés? What if, instead, the demise of a subset of the humanities...