Reconstructing the University Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century [Hardcover]

Current conversations on the state of academia contain a broad sense of crisis over changes in the body of university knowledgethe decline of literature, the unbridling of ethnic studies, the growth of various applied programs, and so on. Much of the concern revolves around a perceived deterioration of the academic core in which, the thinking goes, the university's teaching and research priorities are increasingly compromised by external financial and political interests.With data on faculty and course composition over the twentieth century for a global sample of universities, this book provides an examination unprecedented in scope and scale of changes in academia. The authors document the changing emphases accorded the branches of learning, the applied and basic divisions, and the disciplinary fields. They find deep transformations, as anticipated, but offer a new explanation for these shifts. Changes in academic focus are less the work of outside interest groups, but instead are cultural maps to the altering features of globally institutionalized understandings of reality. I found this book absolutely engrossing and enlightening. Detailed study of transformations in the teaching and research priorities of universities worldwide, examining how these changes correspond to globally institutionalized understandings of reality. A complex work that will be of interest to scholars in many fields, as well as to any critics of higher education who wish to embrace a more thoughtful view of the reasons behind curriculum change than some we have seen in the past. This is gripping stuff: the claim is that, over time, universities have grown to resemble one another, in terms of how they allocate their faculty resources and thereby demonstrate dedication to upholding the various disciplines. More centrally, from Frank and Gabler's perspective, this trend is a clear manifestation of the global macro-level phenomena they see in their broadly international data. This is an lÓP