the most important thing we know least about

Given Fabio’s last couple of posts (and before he finishes eating my lunch), I thought I should move this one up in the queue. Conversations at a conference organized a few years back by Mitchell Stevens, Elizabeth Armstrong, and Richard Arum shaped my thinking. I commend to you the Annual Review of Sociology piece they produced, but they bear no responsibility at all for my wild-eyed ranting.

Let me start with a modest proposition:  The university is the most important institution in contemporary society and the one about which we know the least.  The organizations and institutions of contemporary higher education are undergoing far-reaching  transitions that stand to remake key features of our social world, but we have largely ignored those changes.  Fabio points to one such shift in the funding model for higher education and a recent WaPo op-ed by Steve Brint highlights some implications for admissions.  But why should we expect something seemingly innocuous like a slow but dramatic decline in the proportion of state funding in public university budgets to fundamentally alter bigger things like the stratification order?                                             

The contemporary university is the only institution that is one step from all parts of our society.  If you start on a big university campus you can easily reach, well, anywhere.  I challenge you to think of another contemporary institution that is a hop away from professional sports, healthcare, the military, government, high culture, religion, science, the boardroom, activism, the financial system . . . the list could go on. The university is our key institutional hub.  I can think of no equivalent. There’s no church that does the trick (though a diffuse notion of christianity might come close), civic organizations are on the decline, the all volunteer military is increasingly isolated from the bulk of the citizenry, one might even argue that in the era of the long tail popular culture will fail to serve as a social glue.  That leaves the campus.

Despite all this, we have very few systematic studies of the university qua organization. We know suprising little about their internal workings. Perhaps this is because they are such giant, unwieldy beasts.  Still, the multi-divisional firm isn’t exactly a lemonade stand and we’ve been beating our heads against it for years. Perhaps studying our own institutional home is just too uncomfortable?  But, then again, there’s a whole lot of the sociology of me out there.  I think the problems is that we don’t have a language sufficient to let us grapple with the interesting questions at stake. 

 Stevens and colleagues point us in the right direction by thinking in metaphorical terms of about what these beasts do and for whom. In addition to being a hub, they take universities to be temples,  sieves, and incubators.  Legitimating knowledge and credentialing experts, sorting and classifying people, and socializing citizens add some serious breadth to the portfolio, which gets even broader when you take into account the economic development role that has become a significant part of many campus efforts. No surprise, I guess, but I’m most fascinated by the idea that the university is one of the few remaining cross-roads of civil society.  In order to do that successfully, universities have to be stable, something increasingly at risk as public funding declines.  They also have to be traversable shortcuts across societal domains, which requires broad access and a form of transparency. Finally, they have to be generative of both well-understood and novel things.  That’s a tough organizational hat trick to pull off.

If a group of organizations is positioned one step from everywhere and we inadvertently but fundamentally change their key features, then we have every reason to expect unintended consequences to ramify quickly and to reach far out into the world. We’re particularly at risk when the changes we make alter the things that enable universities to be institutional hubs.  If we monkey too much with the balance between access and excellence or between social engagement and institutional autonomy,  for instance,  then I think the stakes are higher than we know.  But those are precisely the issues in play when we think about changing funding, or admissions, or the role of academic science vis-à-vis commerce or  . . .

This isn’t the place to undertake a lengthy literature review, but suffice it so say that there’s a lot of good contemporary work that examines small pieces of the university puzzle, some of it done by folks posting right here. There are even a few older, classic works.  But I don’t think anyone out there is trying to eat the whole enchilada.  There’s a marvelous book to be written about these issues in the context of University of California system, where efforts to stave off the implosion of one of the institutional wonders of the world yank all this stuff right to the surface.  Dissertation anyone?