Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University [Paperback]

Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism,Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research Universityuses the history of the university and reframes the Protestant Ethic to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world.

William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research,Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research Universityinvestigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of lecturing with applause and publish or perish, and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

Prologue
1. Charisma and Rationalization
Part One - Tradition, Rationalization, Charisma
On the Dominion of the Author and the Legible
2. The Lecture Catalogue
3. The Lecture and the Disputation
4. The Examination
5. The Research Seminar
6. The Doctor of Philosophy
7. The Appointment of a Professor
8. The Library Catalogue
Part Two - Narrative, Conversation, Reputation
On the Ineluctability of the Voice and the Oral