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 across these functional linkages between higher education and society is one final fundamental characteristic. Education in general and higher education in particular are inevitably matters of moral concern. This is grounded in two circumstances. First, all education is directly involved in the institutionalization, reproduction, and transmission of the fundamental values of society to succeeding generations—always a moral matter. Second, the historical heritage of higher education is profoundly moral. From their medieval beginnings, its activities were indistinguishable from religious morality. This translated itself to the view of the university as a sacred entity, and, for its members, the idea that involvement in the university represented a higher religious calling. Even though most universities have been “de-churched” (Tuchman 2009) and are by now fully secular institutions, versions of the sacred, ecclesiastical hierarchy and the calling survive in recognizable form (see Brubacher 1978). Brint recently observed that “[e]ducation is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States” (2011: 2). In modern garb this includes the ideas that education’s work is of the highest value (example: “The university preserves and interprets the best of what human intelligence has created and written” [Hearn 2006: 160]); that that work demands love; and that educators should manifest a certain ascetic, antimaterialistic attitude (which conveys further that one should not want and/or become too involved in worldly rewards). These ideals are held, in variable form and strength, by those in the academy and as expectations for the academy on the part of those outside it. The three basic historical roles of higher education—teaching, search for knowledge, and service to society—are each endowed with the connotation that they are publicly valued missions. Part—but only part—of the claims of higher education to status, public support, and legitimacy is a matter of representing itself and being regarded by outsiders as a higher activity, no longer fully priestly but having some of those qualities and roles.
Three corollaries follow from the postulate that institutions of higher education are seats of claims to and recognition of high moral purpose:
First, claims to a morality (and special expertise) generate special and high expectations, both within the academy and in the larger public. If a class of activities is designated as special and superior, those practitioners of them are expected to live up to those standards. This has been a constant characteristic of priestly and quasi-priestly classes—the pressure to live up to their billing.
Second, on the basis of such claims, academic classes are typically granted high status and do not hesitate to accept and claim that status. Nor do they hesitate to grant others less status. Balderston argued that “administrative staff members, including those at professional and senior levels, cannot share directly in this [academic] status system and are, worse yet, sometimes the victims of academic snobbery and contempt for bureaucracy” (1974: 80). Duderstadt, himself a long-serving president in a leading university, commented simply that “[academic] arrogance knows no bounds” (2000: 123).
Third, an inevitable ingredient that accompanies claims to moral commitment, high expectations, and high status is that deviation from its standards is more than simple straying. It is tinged with the corruption of the sacred, and thus justifies strong moral reactions. Consistently, the preferred mode of reflecting and writing on colleges and universities has been one of morality and moral passion. Colleges and universities embody the highest of hopes and the greatest of despair, blame, and moral loss when these hopes seem to be compromised. That language is infused with the positive affects of love, admiration, and rhapsody and the negative affects of disappointment, betrayal, and outrage. With all this the stage is set for recurrent episodes of both idealization and vilification.
I hope that these general reflections will prove useful in enlightening the endemic conflicts that swirl around processes of change in academia (below, pp. 60-64). But I do not wish to press these observations too far and claim that the moral dimension is the sole or strongest ingredient of higher education; secular elements abound in academic culture. But it cannot be ignored as a heritage and a reality, and if we do not keep it in mind, we cannot understand what has transpired and is transpiring.
The peculiarities I have identified—functions, relations with society, and moral embeddedness—supply the context for the topics to which I now turn: growth and change in American higher education. In fact, that process of growth itself is a distinctive feature of higher education. But that growth, to be understood, has to be regarded in relation the heritage of societal involvement and moral embeddedness.
STRUCTURAL CHANGES ACCOMPANYING GROWTH
Growth has been the hallmark of American higher education in the past one and one-half centuries. This has been pulsating, to be sure, with periods of extremely rapid increase in, for example, the late nineteenth century and the two decades following World War II, as well as periods of stagnation such as Great Depression and the 1970s and 1980s. We will examine the causes and consequences of such irregularities as we go along, but initially we must clear some theoretical ground.
One way of tracking growth is by different quantitative indices—expenditures, numbers of students, faculty, graduates, and institutions. These reveal its magnitude. However, social scientists know that neither rapid nor long-term growth typically occurs without some qualitative changes in the social structures involved in that growth. The following
