weakness of the chair. Given the “foreignness” of European dictatorial models, given the democratic thread in American society, and given the academic culture of “company of equals,” it was probably foreordained that the chair would be a comparatively powerless position. Though there are exceptions (e.g., chairs in medical schools), in general the chair is low on authority and high on persuasion, coddling, diplomacy, coordination, and conflict management (Gmelch and Miskin 1995). I served as chair of my department twice during my career, and from those assignments I emerged with a working definition: “A department chair is a person that spends 80 percent of his or her time running errands on behalf of disagreeable colleagues.” In retrospect I was wrong: 50 percent would be better, with 25 percent in dealing with factions and 25 percent in paperwork. Chairs carried much of the responsibility with respect to all aspects of affirmative action and subsequent diversification efforts. When I was chair I attended the annual meetings of sociology departmental chairs around the country; these gatherings tended to turn into group therapy sessions. I should add that departments with opportunities for external research funding experience an increase in individual faculty entrepreneurship and a decrease in collective faculty involvement in departmental life. Furthermore, the chair must continually negotiate with those researchers about teaching time to be bought off and deal with the chronic headaches of maintaining the department’s teaching commitments.While historically necessary and perhaps the best of worlds on balance, the chairmanship presents problems of weakness and tedium for incumbents and problems of motivation for potential incumbents. Many faculty regard it as an onerous distraction from more important work (mainly research), with the result that some of the most active and outstanding researchers make a career of avoiding the office. Correspondingly, some deans make a career of beating the bushes for willing and able people—and those not offensive to their colleagues—to take on the job.
Structure and culture of departments. It is in the nature of scientific and scholarly activity to fragment and spread over time as new discoveries are made, new lines and subtraditions of research develop, and new uses for knowledge become evident. New interdisciplinary initiatives flourish and hybrid fields are formed. Sometimes these are significant enough that they become the basis of additional structures—research programs, even departments such as astrophysics and neuroscience, or multidisciplinary organized research units. Sometimes bypassed fields, such as zoology or geography, partially disappear and are reabsorbed into other units.
Despite these organizational adjustments, I must point to the fundamental structural rigidity of departments. This persists in the natural sciences even with the flexibility I just noted. In the social sciences and the humanities the rigidity is striking, with almost no change in disciplinary-departmental designation since they were introduced into higher education in the late nineteenth century. Yet all these fields show a continuing intellectual process of extension, diversification, and fragmentation. This means that the new directions are absorbed under one departmental roof. The consequences are paradigmatic incoherence in disciplines, more specialization, less comprehension of the whole discipline by its own members, and more internal conflict over priorities in faculty appointments and teaching responsibilities. Even in economics, which boasts greater paradigmatic unity than its sister social sciences, recent history has seen innumerable new subfields and preoccupations—development economics, agency theory, new institutional economics, and above all behavioral economics. All these are absorbed as subthemes in economics departments, and some become subsections in the professional associations. The appearance of new schools of thought and new intellectual emphases are forever pushing to extend the process. And while the long-standing subfields may undergo change, they seldom disappear altogether. All this is good news in that it reflects intellectual dynamism, but it creates problems of integration and synthesis of knowledge.
I have referred to these dynamics as a contradiction between the rigidities of structure (the department) and the dynamics of culture (the discipline), which yields a picture of departmental overloading, competition and conflict over priorities, and disciplinary sprawl. This contradiction is a running sore that is continuously dealt with but seldom formally acknowledged.
The Organized Research Unit as Distraction from Departments
Laurence Veysey (1965: 338) noted that the basic structure of the modern university was set in the early twentieth century with the consolidation of the research impulse and the academic department. The only subsequent structural innovation, he noted in a side comment, was the system of research centers or institutions, and these were expressions of the augmented research impulse.
An organized research unit is a university structure separate from an academic department. It is usually established as a response to an interest on the part of an external agency (foundation or government), which offers resources for some line of research to be launched and carried out. A recent instance is the creation of a number of research institutes on the study of different facets of terrorism, sponsored and financed by the Department of Homeland Security. Institutes and centers have a faculty director and an assemblage of affiliated faculty members (usually interdisciplinary), a physical location on or near the campus, and a supporting infrastructure. These units also have developed a staying power almost as strong as departments. Their director and affiliates are constituencies, believe in and proclaim the legitimacy of their efforts, and resist efforts to discontinue them. In a word, they, too, are accretions.
From the perspective of the academic department, the many research units on campuses provide alternate homes and foci of identification for its members. Typically, though not always, their research grants are administered through organized research units; this includes recruiting and hiring research assistants. These units also often provide clerical and staff support that is more generous than that available in departments. Since they are more intellectually focused than departments, the faculty member may find that his or her interests mesh more comfortably with others in research units than they do with departmental colleagues. Research units are also the setting for working groups, seminars, colloquia, and conferences, though they do not offer formal courses. All this adds up to the fact that, in addition to being intellectual supplements to departments, research units are also competitors with departments for loci of research, time spent, and intellectual commitment. Aware of this, I once described the academic department as an emptying residual, a place where the chair negotiates over what and how much faculty teach, and an arena in which colleagues fight over who gets hired and who does not. Perhaps it is not too much to say that departments have been hollowed out as intellectual communities but retain vitality as political entities. These are oversimplifications at best, but they take note of the fact that academic departments and organized research units are in some respects at cross-purposes in the knowledge arena—a point whose extent and significance are not fully appreciated.
REACTIONS AND CONFLICTS ENDEMIC IN THE PROCESS OF ACCRETION
Numerous commentators have noted a paradox of extremes in American higher education. It experiences simultaneous love and hate. It is asserted to be the best in world but at the same time is assaulted on multiple fronts. Altbach observed that “at the same time that American academe has come in for unprecedented criticism at home, it is widely emulated abroad” (2001: 11). During the 1990s I served on an international body called the German-American Academic Council, composed of about two dozen scholars, civil servants, and political leaders from both countries. A consistent theme was that the German members could find much to praise about the American system (especially its political decentralization and competition among universities) and almost nothing to praise about their own. In the meantime, the American members appeared to be noncommittal about the German system but quick to criticize their own on many counts. This anomaly produced a number of dialogues between the deaf.
I would like to develop this anomaly—this theme of ambivalence—further. In doing so, I will first enunciate a little model that has served me well as a scholar of social change. It goes as follows.
Social change typically has both destructive and constructive aspects.
