LITMIR.BIZ

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situation. In addition to this stress, I will make extensive use of the concepts of culture (including subculture), social structure, and groups and group conflict, all standard items in the sociological repertoire. Finally, however, to understand higher education and its dynamics, one must—and I will—selectively bring in tools and insights from economics, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.

      I might cite a final advantage of thinking systemically about higher education. We know so much and we say so much about the characteristics, the history, the nature, and the problems of higher education that our minds are in danger of being overloaded. We academics are great observers, talkers, writers, and worriers; our stock-in-trade is words and insights. This brings to mind the anecdote about a committee meeting at which the chair confidently states that he thinks the group has come to closure on an issue, but one committee member objects and says, “But we haven’t said everything that’s ever been said on the subject.” I do not threaten to do that, but by appealing to the idea of system I hope modestly to make a few new connections between known or asserted things. Why, for example, is it that higher education is simultaneously known to be an institution with a history of spectacular growth and solid institutionalization and simultaneously proclaimed to be in crisis or doomed (Birnbaum and Shushok 2001)? Why are our universities so admired and emulated abroad and so bashed within our boundaries? Why are universities and kindred institutions, so splendid and serene in hope and theory, also fraught with internal ambivalence and group conflict? In these chapters I hope to make some sense of these and other questions.

      WHAT KIND OF CREATURE IS HIGHER EDUCATION?

      I begin not with a formal definition of higher education but a listing of its most salient characteristics as a social institution—characteristics essential for the analysis presented in these chapters.

      Functions

      Describers, apologists, advocates, commentators, and historians of higher education often list a number of its functions, almost all positive. There is variation but some consensus on the following in the literature:

      

       To preserve, create, advance and transmit knowledge to the young, who will be future professional, political, and business leaders of society.

       To impart ranges of expertise to those who will be leaders.

       To serve society more directly by providing useful knowledge for economic growth and prosperity, and community development (Trani and Holsworth 2010).

       To foster individual achievement, social mobility, equality of opportunity, and social justice.

       To serve democracy further by improving the literacy, knowledge, rationality, tolerance and fair-mindedness, and responsible participation on the part of citizens. This has served as a main buttressing argument for liberal and general education.

       To preserve, develop, and augment the general cultural values of our civilization, both by cultivating those values among the young and honing of them through constant and responsible criticism.

       At a different level, to come to the assistance of the nation in its vital struggles—for example, wars, international political competition, and heightened economic competition associated with globalization (Duderstadt 2000).

      The Problematic Status of “Functions”

      This list is fair enough. However, I have come to regard this kind of presentation as problematical in some respects. I list my reservations:

       The exact conceptual status of these activities as “functions” is unclear. They may be regarded as descriptions of what institutions accomplish; they may be regarded as ideals or goals for which they strive but attain only partially; they may be regarded as a source of cultural legitimacy for institutions of higher education, which, like all institutions, require such legitimacy to secure their place, their support, and their continuity in society; or finally and more cynically, they may be regarded as a form of advocacy—namely, as claims to prestige and status, ploys in seeking support, or intellectualized defenses by spokesman in institutions under attack. They are all these things, of course, but the multiple connotations make for ambiguity and perhaps conflict with respect to the status and meaning of the claimed functions.

       Insofar as they are claimed to describe what educational institutions do, they involve causal claims—that is to say, usually implicit assertions that certain lines of activity (teaching, conducting research, advising governments) actually have the intended, usually positive effects. These claims are difficult if not impossible to establish definitively or scientifically. All that we know from evaluation research on “results of schooling,” “educational impact,” and the general relations between knowledge and policy demonstrates that multiple variables are at work and that it is extremely difficult to establish reliable relationships between intervention and outcome, even though elaborate quasi-experimental efforts to control the effects of contaminating variables are made (Rossi and Freeman 1992).

       It follows that there is inevitably a residue of generalized faith that the activities of institutions of higher education are fulfilling their functions adequately or fully. Moreover, this faith usually is not automatically granted and therefore rests on shakier grounds than in other areas (health, protecting the nation, and sufficiency in agriculture) in which the goals are matters of vital importance and high consensus.

      As a result of these difficulties in describing abstract functions, I am going to view the “functions” of higher education more concretely and historically—namely, as sequence of “compacts” between agencies outside those institutions (states, the federal government, philanthropists and donors, interested commercial and industrial parties, and a real and imagined “public”). For example, Thelin concludes that “federal government support for higher education displays a distinctive characteristic: it often is a convenient means for the U.S. government to attain larger national goals” (2004b: 37). States are interested in the correlations between the proportion of their students enrolled in higher education and their rate of economic growth (Zumeta 2004)—even though the direction of causality may be questionable. Actually, the relationship is more complex; it is one of mutual opportunism. External persons or agencies perceive an opportunity, a belief that higher education is a valuable asset in pursuing one or more of their purposes, and educational institutions accept these offers opportunistically. Or, if they are more proactive, those institutions invent and seek out new functions as a way of enhancing their competitive position and survival.

      The “compacts” emerging from these relationships are typically not strict contracts in the legal sense of goods or services being delivered for specific consideration. State governments expect that state colleges and universities will serve mainly the citizens of the state, and those institutions generally comply. Colleges and universities use philanthropic donations for designated purposes, but they resist conditions of regulation by donors, delivery of specific services, and guarantee of specific “outcomes.” Academic freedom is granted with implicit expectations that academics will not exploit the privilege or behave in uncivil ways. Correspondingly, these compacts have had mainly generalized expectations, unspoken assumptions, and trust.

      We may say at this early moment, then, that even at the most fundamental level institutions of higher education, both in their functions and in their relations with external agencies, exhibit notable levels of ambiguity, nonspecificity, and taken-for-grantedness. In my estimation these have been great institutional advantages for colleges and universities, essential for their freedom, autonomy, and adaptability. Yet those very qualities of vagueness increase the probabilities of misunderstandings, disappointments, conflicts, ex post facto accusations of promises made but not kept, as well as recriminations and defenses against those recriminations. The functions I have identified—what society has asked of higher education—do not guarantee such outcomes, but they tilt the system in the direction of producing them.

      Moral Embeddedness

      Cutting

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