academic departments (for a brief account, see Rosenzweig 1998). On the other hand, recent history records some successful efforts to eliminate degree programs and departments, engineered with great dexterity (e.g., Kirwan 2006).
In the literature on higher education we do come across some talk of “unbundling,” but most suggestions deal with outsourcing or privatization of activities without perceived direct educational functions: campus food services, bookstores, operation of student health services, security services, and plant and utility infrastructures (Langenberg 1999). Duderstadt (2000) also mentions admissions, counseling, and certification as possibilities for unbundling. There is discussion and some activity in outsourcing subjects like introductory language instruction to community colleges and elsewhere—subjects already “outsourced” to some degree within institutions to temporary faculty and teaching assistants. The actual cost reductions realized by outsourcing are no doubt highly variable. More ambitious attempts to eliminate the lower division (freshman and sophomore years) of baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities have failed (for two efforts at Stanford, see Cuban 1999), partly because of sentimental attachment to the “four-year degree” as an institutional stamp, partly because of resistance of intercollegiate athletics and alumni, and, by now, also because of the fact that the lower division provides the major sources of “employment” for graduate student teaching assistants. In a word, the talk and activity of unbundling seems more to confirm the strength of the accretion-bundling complex than it does its reversal.
THE DISCIPLINE-BASED ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT: SO STRONG AND YET SO FRAIL
One part of the great transformation of American higher education from the Civil War to the first decades of the twentieth century was the increased specialization of knowledge, both within existing areas of inquiry and by the appearance of new areas. These specializations moved from more diffuse areas of inquiry into “disciplines,” connoting the production of knowledge on the basis of “disciplined” exploration of the subject matter by using an explicit and selective set of analytic assumptions and principles. These intellectual domains differed in rigor and completeness, and still do.
Irregularly but inevitably, the organizational embodiment of disciplines in the United States became the academic department, a largely autonomous subunit of faculty members in a discipline. This distinctive creation—Alain Touraine, the French sociologist, called the department “the great American invention” ([1974] 1997: 33)—had its origins and its cousins in European systems of “faculties,” but it evolved, with variations, as a more collegial and less authoritarian model than those cousins. The “chairman”—now “chair”—even in its strongest manifestations, never reached the dictatorial dimensions of the chief, single “professor” in the German and other systems.
Despite this looseness, the department accumulated power over time and became the principal institutional reality of universities and colleges. Its constant feature is a defined, annually renewed budget and career lines. Its responsibilities have fanned out. Departments are mainly responsible for collegiate and post-graduate curricula and who teaches them; most “majors” are named after disciplines and administered by departments. Future professionals receive their training in discipline-based departments. Their professional names—physicist, geneticist, anthropologist—derive from this training. They find employment in discipline-based departments, and if they have not been certified in department-based training programs, they are scarcely employable (who will hire a “natural scientist” or a “humanist” without further specification?). Advances in their careers (rank, tenure, pay increases) are initiated and largely controlled by departments, though this power is shared with the editors of journal and with publishers of books, as well research-granting agencies, whose decisions govern the main products on which academics are assessed (Bowen and Schwarz 2005). Together, the graduate training and employment systems form discrete labor markets for disciplines, more or less sealed off from other disciplinary markets. And not least, once established, academic departments are notoriously difficult to eliminate, as administrators have learned and know well; they are the quintessential accretions. The main budgetary victims in difficult, downsizing times are weaker experimental and interdisciplinary enterprises that lack the same structural and budgetary foundations. Departments can be squeezed but seldom strangled.
Other institutional arrangements more or less mirror this discipline/department core of colleges and universities. Most professional social scientists with the same disciplinary name are members of a national—and perhaps regional and international—association bearing the name of their disciplines: the American Political Science Association, for example. These associations act as status-protecting and status-enhancing groups and political lobbies. They hold annual meetings, which are simultaneously occasions for intellectual activity, recruitment, socializing, and ritual affirmation of identity and solidarity. Commercial and university publishers honor the disciplines by developing publication lists with disciplinary names—the psychology list, the history list, and so on. Governmental and foundation funders organize their giving in part by discipline-named programs and appoint program officers with disciplinary designations. Honorary and fellowship-awarding societies—such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation—organize their membership lists and categories of award giving along disciplinary lines.
Thus, discipline-based departments persist as the lifeblood and seat of vested interests in institutions of higher education. From a social-psychological point of view, the facts that professionals describe themselves by disciplinary label, find their homes, and carry out their roles in discipline-based departments and associations mean that part of their personal and collective identities will be couched in a disciplinary frame. Departments are the structural bases for what have been called academic tribes with distinctive cultures—in-groups that write to, for, and against one another and bear loves and hates for others (Becher 1989). In everyday life faculty members continuously remind themselves and others and are reminded by others that they have such an identity. The fact that this institutional and personal identity is so pervasive contributes to the idea that disciplines are reified and described as things in our discourse.
Despite all these sources of solidity, the discipline-based department presents a number of dilemmas and frailties that are not fully appreciated—largely, perhaps, because of the mentioned reification. I have noticed and reflected on these in my own career, and present them for your reflection:
The department as a force for expansion. The budget of departments is determined by a process of annual request and justification for faculty and staff positions, office costs, and other expenditures. The chair presents (or is presented with) a budget and may enter into a process of negotiation and adjudication with the administration. Expenses are controlled in this manner, but chairs, backed by their colleagues, exercise systematic pressure to expand or not be cut. One argument typically employed is that unless the department “covers the field” in teaching and research, it not only fails in its intellectual mission but also is also a lesser force in the national competitive arena. Relevant evidence: (a) Chairs of history departments are forever arguing, with fervor, that it is fatal for their entire program if Iberian history (or some other area) isn’t covered. Administrators are continuously bombarded with this logic. (b) Multidisciplinary departments feel less favored because they believe that, if they were distinct, they would fare better competitively and be in a better position to expand. Joint departments of sociology and anthropology live under this tension, even if latent. One source of the discontinuation of the famous Department of Social Relations at Harvard (1946-1970) was restlessness on the part of its psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, based on the feeling that if they existed as separate departments they could compete better for faculty and resources than in their three-in-one arrangement. (c) Those departments that choose the strategy of developing strength by concentrating in delimited areas—small group research or criminology, for example—are seen to hobble themselves by not being able to “cover the field” and offering first-class general graduate training. All these factors generate self-protective or expansionist tendencies.
The
