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Recent scholars of the professions have argued that a new hybrid form of professionalism is becoming dominant. This new form combines traditional commitments to ethics and community service with new commitments to managerial and entrepreneurial objectives. We analyze the perceptions of 4,300 U.S. graduate students in 21 fields concerning how well their programs have prepared them for leadership and management and for ethics and community service. These assessments allow us to examine the prevalence of this new conception of professionalism and to examine it in relation to two other conceptions: the “neo-classical” emphasis on ethics and community service as opposed to leadership and management, and another that emphasizes a divergence between business and technical professions on one side and social and cultural professions on the other. Hybridization was comparatively rare but occurred more frequently among students preparing for management, law, and medicine, and among men and students from more affluent families. We also find some support for the neo-classical thesis insofar as students tended to score higher on the ethics and community measure than on the leadership and management measure. However, the largest number of students took positions consistent with the divergence thesis.

Four environmental forces will influence the future trajectory of U.S. universities: federal patronage, state subsidies, new technologies, and social movements promoting greater equity across racial-ethnic and gender lines. The article describes how they will influence universities and how their impact is influenced by the positional strength of universities, the interests of departments, and the strategic assessments of senior managers. I show how these enviornmental forces can be directed to strengthen, rather than to further weaken, universities.

Are we nearing the end of a worldwide era of university expansion and influence – and, if so, why? The two books under consideration suggest very different answers to these questions. David John Frank and John W. Meyer’s The University and the Global Knowledge Society anticipates continued expansion and influence as university enrollments grow throughout the world and as the university’s knowledge practices rationalize ever more remote areas of human cultural life. John Douglass’s Neo-Nationalism and Universities raises the specter instead of a university sector controlled by illiberal politicians who are intent on restricting the freedom of professors and students and on directing university teaching and research in ways that align with their regimes’ interests. In this essay I argue that Frank and Meyer are right, for the most part, about the continuing expansion and influence of universities and that Douglass and his collaborators are right to worry about the future. But neither of the books focuses on one of the major threats to academe: universities may be in nearly as much danger from internal failings and a weakening market position as they are from external political control. Highly selective colleges and research universities remain vital instruments of national economic and social progress but the value added of less selective institutions is becoming questionable to many prospective students, even those who live in countries at the center of the liberal world order.

For U.S. research universities, cluster hiring has become a popular means to add faculty members in university-defined priority fields. The expectation of advocates is that these faculty members will collaborate on high-impact research. Utilizing a national sample of 168 cluster-hire faculty members from eight U.S. research universities, we find statistically significant gains in research output, collaborations, and research impact from pre- to post-hire. However, these gains are not distributed equally. Some output and impact measures show greater gains for white and Asian researchers relative to under-represented minorities and for men relative to women. Significant gains in research output are associated with fields like advanced materials and health sciences for which generous external support is available. Significant research impact is associated with researchers located in wealthy, prestigious universities. The findings indicate that cluster hiring is no cure-all for fields that are disadvantaged in the competition for external funding or for non-elite universities that are disadvantaged in the competition for prestige.

Status transmission theory argues that leading educational institutions prepare individuals from privileged backgrounds for positions of prestige and power in their societies. We examine the educational backgrounds of more than 2,900 members of the U.S. cultural elite and compare these backgrounds to a sample of nearly 4,000 business and political leaders. We find that the leading U.S. educational institutions are substantially more important for preparing future members of the cultural elite than they are for preparing future members of the business or political elite. In addition, members of the cultural elite who are recognized for outstanding achievements by peers and experts are much more likely to have obtained degrees from the leading educational institutions than are those who achieve acclaim from popular audiences. By focusing on the extent to which industries and cultural domains depend on quickness and facility in the absorption and manipulation of complex and sophisticated symbolic media, our analysis leads to an important specification of the role of highly selective colleges and universities in elite formation.

Over the last three decades, interdisciplinary cluster hiring programs have become popular on research university campuses as an approach to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. These program...

We consider features of cocurricular activities as important learning environments outside of the classroom. Using survey data from seven large public research universities we investigated 17 speci...

Social science interest in professionals and managers as a left- and liberal-trending stratum has increased in recent years. Using General Social Survey data over a 44-year period, the authors examine 15 attitudes spanning social, economic, and political identity liberalism. On nearly all attitudes, professionals and managers have trended in a liberal direction, have liberalized more quickly than blue-collar workers, and are either as or more liberal than blue-collar workers. The authors find that the higher levels of education among professionals and managers, their tendency to adopt nonauthoritarian outlooks, and their lower propensity to identify with fundamentalist religion mediate their more liberal trends vis-à-vis blue-collar workers. Conversely, their higher relative incomes suppress the extent of their economic and criminal justice liberalism. The authors’ theorization links changes in the macro-economy to growing gaps in the composition of the two strata and the activities of politicians and parties to consolidate emerging political differences.

Extending and expanding Geiger and Feller’s (1995) analysis of increasing dispersion in R&D expenditures during the 1980s, the paper analyzes publication and citation counts as well as R&D expenditures for 194 top producers using Web of Science data. We find high and stable levels of inequality in the 1990s and 2000s, combined with robust growth both in the system and on individual campuses, considerable opportunities for short-range mobility and very limited opportunities for long-range mobility. Initial investments in research, private control, and the capacity of wealthy institutions to attract productive faculty are associated with high levels of scientific output. New entrants to the system and those that leave the system are both clustered near the bottom of the hierarchy.

This volume of RSF presents new evidence about higher education in the United States. As we use the term, higher education is synonymous with postsecondary education and includes two-year community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities that offer graduate training in addition to four-year

This chapter presents a portrait of the dominant system for organizing and pursuing knowledge and the contributions of that system to American life. It aims to convey some of the hidden strengths of the current system while revealing several of the vulnerabilities that have made it a target for those who would like to use it for more exclusively utilitarian purposes. While it is true that much academic research is intended for other academics, it is easy to miss the many unheralded ways that academic research informs public discourse, public policy, and organizational processes. The chapter then attempts to offer a more rounded picture of the contributions made by university researchers and educators than can be found in the critical literature.

This chapter explores the processes and discourses of enrollment expansion, as well as the mechanisms colleges and universities have used to help improve the prospects of students who are most at risk of noncompletion. The sociologist James E. Rosenbaum (1998) coined the term “college for all” to describe the aspirations of policymakers and college and university administrators to extend college opportunities as widely as possible. Access and completion are the drivers of the educational revolution that has made college seem less like a choice than a necessity, but the revolution could not have occurred unless it had preserved and indeed added ways for ambitious students to acquire status at college and beyond graduation.

This chapter argues that the traditional structures and purposes of colleges and universities are intended to produce two outcomes: the expansion of knowledge, principally in the disciplines but also at their interstices, and the development of students' cognitive capacities and subject matter knowledge. The chapter shows that these objectives gave rise to two movements. One was the movement to use university research to advance economic development through the invention of new technologies with commercial potential. The other was to use colleges and universities as instruments of social inclusion, providing opportunities to members of previously marginalized groups, including women, racial—ethnic minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. They were driven both by external parties and the great philanthropic foundations, and by campus constituencies who benefited from their advance.

This chapter talks about the priorities that patrons expressed and the consequences of their largesse, focusing on the three giants of giving: the federal government, the fifty states, and million-dollar-plus donors. It argues that the priorities of patrons tended to favor fields that were closely aligned with power centers in American society—many connected to technological innovation—and their financial aid preferences tipped decidedly in the direction of support for middle-class and affluent college students. Less well-connected fields and financially needy students were not neglected by patrons, but support for them failed to keep pace. By contrast, most professors identified with the structures of academic professionalism, and a large proportion also supported the universities' aspirations for wider social inclusion.

Today's headlines suggest that universities' power to advance knowledge and shape American society is rapidly declining. But this book's author has tracked numerous trends demonstrating their vitality. After a recent period that witnessed soaring student enrollment and ample research funding, the book argues that universities are in a better position than ever before. Focusing on the years 1980–2015, it details the trajectory of American universities, which was influenced by evolving standards of disciplinary professionalism, market-driven partnerships (especially with scientific and technological innovators outside the academy), and the goal of social inclusion. Conflicts arose: academic entrepreneurs, for example, flouted their campus responsibilities, and departments faced backlash over the hiring of scholars with nontraditional research agendas. Nevertheless, educators' commitments to technological innovation and social diversity prevailed and created a new dynamism. The book documents these successes along with the challenges that result from rapid change. Today, knowledge-driven industries generate almost half of US GDP, but divisions by educational level split the American political order. Students flock increasingly to fields connected to the power centers of American life and steer away from the liberal arts. And opportunities for economic mobility are expanding even as academic expectations decline. In describing how universities can meet such challenges head on, especially in improving classroom learning, the book offers not only a clear-eyed perspective on the current state of American higher education but also a pragmatically optimistic vision for the future.

This chapter discusses other major challenges to the U.S. higher education system: rising costs, online competition, and controversies over permissible speech. These challenges can be interpreted as problems of growth in the context of resource constraints. Cost problems were largely attributable to universities' requirements for sufficient revenues to support larger staffs and new responsibilities within the context of state disinvestment. Online competition was a result of the search for market alternatives to traditional, high-cost residential campuses within the context of an expanding system that included many low-income students. And the conflicts over speech were, in most cases, the by-product of tensions between students from comparatively privileged backgrounds and those from underrepresented groups.

This chapter discusses the analytical contrast between the two systems for organizing research and education, the system of academic professionalism and the system of academic innovationism. Under the impetus of academic innovationism, universities became more porous to the outside world and reciprocal relations of knowledge exchange grew denser. On balance, the new system contributed significantly and positively to the research prowess of universities. But it has also yielded a spotty record—some extraordinary successes but also many short-lived, troubled collaborations. Some universities invested heavily in the infrastructure to foster academic innovation and had little to show for their investments. For research universities, the challenge for the future will be to expand the possibilities to contribute more to the national innovation effort.

This chapter examines how, in the college-for-all era, colleges and universities simultaneously maintained and expanded high-status tracks and locations. In most cases the mechanisms that colleges used to encourage high-achieving and motivated students reinforced rather than redistributed family-related social advantages. These mechanisms ranged from increased levels of selectivity in the country's elite colleges and the maintenance of rigorous standards in quantitative majors to the addition of new honors and leadership programs. By multiplying status locations on campus, colleges and universities maintained and invented new hierarchies of privilege even as they accommodated intensifying demands for democratization and equity. Diversity was desirable so long as it did not harm white upper-middle-class students' own opportunities.

This chapter analyzes how, as colleges and universities expanded and became more important features of the American institutional landscape, those who occupied senior managerial positions separated themselves more completely from the faculty. They developed features of a professionalized occupation—including separate training programs and formal knowledge bases—albeit one that remained influenced by traditions of shared governance. This separation led to many complaints by faculty members about the rise of a soulless corporate model of university administration. Professionalized management did not weaken the steering capacity of universities—quite the opposite. Yet bottom-line considerations did often intrude in ways that were counterproductive to the educational mission of the institutions.

This chapter considers the weakness that strikes at the core of academe's objectives and makes the triumph of online alternatives more plausible. The issue has been diplomatically described as “underachievement” in undergraduate education, but it could be described equally well as the failure to inculcate professional standards and expectations for college teachers. The chapter analyzes why the disparate efforts during the period to reform undergraduate teaching and to make colleges accountable for student learning failed to transform college classrooms. It also shows why the new sciences of learning have the potential to create the more powerful learning environments that earlier reformers failed to produce.

This chapter reviews the argument focusing on accommodation and conflict among three logics of practice influencing the development of contemporary universities. The first is the intellectual logic of disciplinary advance and education in the disciplines. The second is a market logic that encourages administrators and faculty members to pursue new sources of revenue wherever they can find them, so long as they can be justified on academic grounds. The third is a social inclusion logic that seeks to incorporate members of disadvantaged groups into the campus culture. The chapter shows how the book has been an investigation of the ways that colleges and universities have woven together these competing but ultimately compatible principles: the search for undiscovered knowledge, the pursuit of new market opportunities, and the movement for greater social inclusion.

The chapters in this volume add new empirical evidence and new thinking to issues of system-level, campus-level, and classroom-level effectiveness. They were chosen by the editors from among sixty-two proposals submitted to the Russell Sage Foundation. Our choices were based on the quality of the

This study compares the explanatory power of two models of academic governance: dual and managerial control. The research is based on characterizations by chief academic officers of the primary decision-makers involved in 13 types of recurrent academic decisions. We examine change between responses to surveys fielded to US four-year colleges and universities in 2000 and 2012. We find limited support for the dual control and the managerial control models in both years. As an alternative to the two dominant conceptual models, we develop an empirically grounded classification based on multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. In each year we find high faculty participation and management-dominant clusters. The other identified clusters do not map well onto either of the two dominant conceptual models. Given these results, we argue that configurational analysis should be used as a supplement to future studies monitoring the incidence of dual and managerial control in academic governance.

We theorize 5 dimensions of academic disengagement based on students’ values, motivations, study behaviors, academic interactions, and competing involvements. Using 2010 survey data from the University of California, we find support for this conceptualization. The size of disengaged populations varied between 5% and 25%, depending on the measure used. On most measures, male students, upper-division students, students with low college GPAs, and students in the humanities and social sciences were significantly more likely, net of covariates, to be among academically disengaged populations. Students with high SAT scores were also more likely to be among academically disengaged populations.

My vision of the sociology of education comes out of identification with the aspirations of the nineteenth-century founders of sociology, many of whom, in Comte’s ([1851–1854] 1896) words, saw the new discipline as the ‘‘queen of the sciences.’’ For this founding generation, sociology could aspire to be the most important of the social sciences because it took the widest view, focusing not on a single set of social institutions but on all social institutions examined in comparative and historical perspective. Many of my teachers at Berkeley and Harvard shared something of this aspiration, and it was consequently easy for me to maintain it, however at odds it may have been with the main lines of development of the specialization area in which I was most interested. For someone who comes from this tradition, the questions are not, ‘‘What is the government funding now?’’ or ‘‘What is the most efficient way to obtain tenure?’’ Instead, the questions are, ‘‘How have human beings lived together over the centuries under different demographic and different technological conditions?’’ ‘‘What institutions and cultural understandings have they erected to organize action?’’ ‘‘How have they sustained social order?’’ and, ‘‘How and why did their institutions and social relations change over time?’’ When this perspective is applied to the institutions of schooling, a comparative and historical framework is clearly important. We would want to investigate, as Max Weber did, what the educational experience of sons of aristocrats trained for leadership and heroism looked like, what the education of mandarin Chinese preparing for a place in the imperial bureaucracy looked like, what the education of a middle-class German brought up under the philosophy of bildung looked like, and what the education of technical specialists in the age of bureaucracy looks like. And of course we would also want to look beyond the education of elites, as Weber failed to do. We would want to draw on those who studied the Lancasterian system of drilling the urban poor in industrializing England and the anthropologists who have studied the far-from-regimented schooling typical of rural areas in many developing countries. Not only do the worldwide sweep and comparative focus tell us about the possibilities of schooling in human societies; they can also bring our own situation into clearer relief. It is hard, for example, to know that the social status and pay of school teachers can vary dramatically with significant effects on professional style and expectations if one looks only at the contemporary United States, in which teachers are paid relatively poorly compared to other educated workers. Such a narrow perspective misses out altogether on the value the Germans and Japanese have placed on the teaching profession as evidenced by their teachers’ salaries and status in society. We might also be in a better position to judge how well our two-year community college system works in producing technically qualified labor if we compare it to the German dual system of apprenticeship training or the Japanese system of institutionalized network ties between secondary school teachers and employers. The broader perspective I commended in the essay can be completely compatible with present-day concerns and policy-related research. However, if this broader perspective prevailed, contemporaryconcerns and policy-related research would be appreciated as valuable applied arms of the field rather than its core. Given this background and these identifications, it will come as no surprise that I found much to appreciate in Rob Warren’s response to my essay, or that I emerged a little dejected from reading it. Warren’s analysis brings out

Higher education classification arose in the United States as a result of the dramatic growth in institutions and students in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the growing federal role as sponsor of research. This paper discusses two epistemological approaches to classification: a priori and empirical and the strengths and weaknesses of both. The paper also discusses recent developments that suggest the era of higher education classification may be ending in the developed world. The paper concludes with an application of lessons from the U.S. case to current debates over higher education classification in Chile.

I was born in Albuquerque, NM in 1951. My father, one of the first computer systems analysts, worked in the defense industry at Sandia Laboratories. My mother raised three boys and acted in local theater. Both of my parents were Jewish, but secular by orientation. Though neither held advanced degrees, they were politically liberal and intellectually oriented. When I told my parents at age 9 that I had no intention to continue with Sunday school, my mother agreed as long as I promised to read an illustrated treatise on the world’s major religions.

Conventional sociological accounts of the rise and fall of academic fields have been challenged by accounts based on the idea of market-responsive change. In this article, we focus on the period 1980–2000, the period during which, according to its proponents, the market model of change became dominant in academe. We find changes in the student market to be strongly associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. We also find the preferences of donors to be associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. By contrast, we find relatively little support for labor market signals or changes in federal funding priorities as important influences on the institutionalization of academic fields. We find that higher-status institutions are more market responsive than lower-status institutions.