Since the late 1960s the political right and business leaders have called for a more utilitarian approach to higher education, rejecting what many see as the uselessness of academic knowledge particularly as it exists in the liberal arts.1 In the last 20 years, the intensity of these calls has increased, manifesting into the accountability and assessment movement and throwing higher education into something of an identity crisis.
This crisis has troubled the academyâs cultural, social , and economic role. It has also illuminated a difficult reality of most institutions of higher education, which is that they have few resources available to radically reimagine the purposes, scope, and structures of the tradition in the face of these kinds of external pressures. Ronald Barnett and Kelly Coate argue, for example, that there has been virtually no modern debate or meaningful scholarship developed around the idea of curriculum in higher education. Instead, any talk of curriculum is framed exclusively within the context of teaching methods for content delivery.2
In the face of mounting skepticism, most institutions have not responded through creative revision to organizational , departmental, and pedagogical structures, but instead by trading some amount of encroaching bureaucratic oversight for their ability to maintain the curricular status quo in increasingly smaller spheres of autonomy.
The lack of robust institutional response could be explained, in part, by the history of higher education in the United States. Until very recently, American colleges and universities were largely protected institutions. In the twentieth century they received a tremendous amount of financial support from the state and a truly explosive increase in student population. Further, their very existence brought economic and cultural capital to towns and states around the country.3 Their academic subjects were seen as an obvious democratic and economic necessity. With this protection they developed their own complex, heterogeneous, and, at times, antagonistic aims and purposes. As David Labaree argues, higher education in America ââŠwas a system, but it had no overall structure of governance and it did not emerge from a plan. It just happened, through an evolutionary process that had direction but no purpose. We have a higher education system in the same sense that we have a solar system, each of which emerged over time according to its own rules. These rules shaped the behavior of the system but they were not the product of intelligent design.â4 Perhaps it would be more precise to say there was no rationalist autocratic architect. Modern American colleges and universities are a jungle of creatures with instincts, aims, and purposes that developed over generations, which still belong to a shared ecosystem. While higher education in the United States has a long and complex history, the institution has developed devoid of a single intentional conceptual orientation because it was largely unnecessary for its own flourishing. As a result, it has few resources available to describe and articulate a robust rationale describing its practices and impacts.
This situation is compounded by graduate schools responsible for training academic faculty. Most American graduate programs have maintained a sharp disciplinary orientation and view their role largely as training charismatic academic researchers who will flourish in terms of their grant attainment and publication record.5 This training is codified by tenure and promotion processes that are built around the same set of narrow, disciplinary-specific values and achievements. The faculty have been trained, in other words , to see their research as the true value they bring to institutions. Their pedagogical and administrative labor âthe aspect of their labor that is most actively involved into the reconstitution of the institution, itselfâis seen either as unnecessary to their lives as scholars or as a direct distraction to it. Unlike in previous generations, many faculty today in the United States have neither the interest nor incentive to cultivate a robust theoretical understanding of the institutional and organizational ecosystems that support their work as scholars .
For those who wish to engage and resist these external pressures, the available literatures are largely anemic in the face of the complexity and immediacy of the problems we now face.
The majority of traditional educational research , for example, has given little sustained treatment to the university as an ontologically distinct unit. Instead, the largest and most well-established bodies of scholarship in educational research are directed at the K-12 system or focused on adult education. While there are strands of this research that are of significant use to scholars interested in systems of higher education, it rarely considers higher education a distinct field and therefore does not engage directly with issues unique to colleges and universities.
The smaller, though active, strands of educational research that focus on issues in higher education are often neither critical nor theoretical in their approach. The two main streams of this kind of contemporary higher education research are the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) and higher educational leadership and policy studies. The former focuses exclusively on pedagogical issues in higher education, while the latter is concerned improving administrative and co-curricular practices. Both fields typically draw on a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches and are concerned supporting and reinforcing the status quo. As such, they do not offer robust, critical imaginaries capable of reconstructing institutions of higher learning .
A third body of scholarship is found within the discipline of philosophy. Philosophers as wide ranging as Kant , Humboldt (Wilhelm), Hutchins , Whitehead , and Derrida played a key role in some of the most significant and imaginative university reforms of the last several hundred years. Yet while philosophy has a historical involvement within higher education, the work failed to materialize into a discourse creating sustainable material change in the trajectory of present higher education. There are at least two reasons for this failure. The first is that while philosophical examinations and reconstructions of the university have existed nearly as long as the institution, itself, they have been produced ad hoc by scholars in response to particular, localized issues or events. The modern discipline has simply never understood education, much less higher education, as a core concern. The second reason is that the majority of current philosophers writing about higher education have concerned themselves with broad investigations into the idea of education. While many of these texts offer creative imaginaries for the future of the institution, they remain disconnected from the material and political conditions of institutions. As such, they offer no path forward to faculty and administrators who might operationalize their vision or reconstruct it for a local campus community .
A more recent discourse called Critical University Studies (CUS) has developed, filling a significant void in the landscape of higher education research and practice. Jeffrey Williams locates the history of the field in terms of the emergence, since the early 1990s, of âthe...