The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds

Author(s): Burton R. Clark

Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 18, No. 5 (Jun. - Jul., 1989), pp. 4-8
Published by: American Educational Research Association
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 The Life
Academic
Small Worlds, Different Worlds
BURTON R. CLARK
The American professoriateis enormouslydifferentiatedby
disciplineand typeof institutionon such primarydimensionsof
as patternsof work,identification,
professionalism authority,career,
andassociation.Integration acrosstheprofessoriate
no longercomes
primarilyfrom similarityof functionand commonsocialization,
butfromtheoverlapof subcommunities and the mediatinglinkages
providedby the ties of disciplineand institution.
Educational Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 4-8
Researcher,
oday,nearthe end of the 20thcentury,the American
system of higher education is highly diversified,
steadily dividing along the two basic lines of disci-
pline and type of institution. As the system goes, so does
the academicprofession reap, evolving into a multisided oc-
cupation composed of many different professions, semi-
professions, and nonprofessional fields. I want to explore
the natureof this extremedifferentiation,particularlyits self-
amplifying tendency, and then suggest some largely hid-
den links that may yet connect academics one to another
even as common values and experiences recede.
The Growing Division of Labor
The modern differentiation of the American professoriate
means straightawaythat we deceive ourselves, and others,
every time we speak in simplistic terms of the professor in
the university, or the college professor. Disciplinary dif-
ferences alone demand a more exacting approach in which
the field of competence and study is front and center. In
the leading universities, for example, the clinical professor
of medicine is as much a part of the basic work force as is
the professorof English. The medicalacademiccan be found
in a cancerward, interactingintensively with other doctors,
nurses, orderlies, laboratory assistants, a few students
perhaps, and many patients in a round of tightly scheduled
activities that may begin at seven in the morning and ex-
tend into various evenings and weekends. Such academics
are often under considerable pressure to generate income
from patient-carerevenues: They frequently negotiate with
third-partymedical plans and need a sizable administrative
staff to handle patient billing. Salary may well depend on
group income that fluctuates from year to year and that is
directly affected by changes in the health-careindustry and
by the competitive position of a particularmedical school-
hospital complex. Hence salary may not be guaranteed,
even in a tenured post. Sizable research grants must also
be actively and repetitively pursued, and those who do not
raise funds from research grants will find themselves load-
ed up with more clinical duties.'
-4 EDUCA TIONAL RESEARCHER
The humanities professor operates in a totally different
environment: Teaching "loads" are in the range of four to
six hours a week. Office hours are at one's discretion; ad-
ministrativeassignments vary considerablywith one's will-
ingness to cooperate. The humanities academictypically in-
teractswith large numbers of beginning students in lecture
halls, in an occasional turn in introductory classes; with
smaller numbers of juniors and seniors, in specialized up-
per division courses; and then with a few graduatestudents
in seminars and dissertation consultation, around such
highly specialized topics as Elizabethanlyric and Icelandic
legend. Much valuable work time can be spent at home,
away from the "distractions" of the university office.
About what is one thinking and writing? Attention may
center on a biography of Eugene O'Neill, an interpretation
of what Jane Austen really meant, an effort to trace Lillian
Hellman's political passions, or a critique of Derrida and
deconstructionism. Professors seek to master a highly spe-
cialized segment of literature and to maximize individual
interpretation. The interests of humanities professors are
reflected not only in the many sections and byways of such
omnibus associationsas the Modern Language Association,
but also in the specificities of the Shakespeare Association
of America,the Dickens Society, the D. H. LawrenceSociety
of North America, the Speech Association of America, the
Thomas Hardy Society of America, and the Vladimir Na-
bokov Society. Tocqueville's famous comment on the pro-
pensity of Americans to form voluntary associations is
nowhere more true than in the academic world.
Disciplinary differences are of course not limited to the
sharp contrast between life in a medical school and in a
departmentof English. The work of Tony Becherand others
on the cultures of individual disciplines has shown that
bodies of knowledge variously determine the behavior of
individuals and departments (see especially Becher, 1987).
Disciplines exhibit discernible differences in individual
behavior and group action, notably between "hard" and
"soft" subjects and "pure" and ""applied"fields; in a sim-
BURTON R. CLARK is AllanM. CartterProfessorof HigherEduca-
tion and Sociologyat the GraduateSchoolof Education,Univer-
sity of California-LosAngeles, Los Angeles, CA 90024. He
specializesin the cross-nationalstudy of highereducation.This
is an editedversionof a paperpresentedat the annual meeting
ofAERAin New Orleans,April1988.Thepaperhighlightsseveral
centralpoints in his bookThe Academic Life: Small Worlds,
Different Worlds (1987), winnerof a 1989AERAOutstanding
BookAward.
pie fourfold classification, between hard-pure (physics),
hard-applied (engineering), soft-pure (history), and soft-
applied (socialwork). Across the many fields of the physical
sciences, the biological sciences, the social sciences, the
humanities, and the arts, fieldwork reveals varied work
assignments, symbols of identity, modes of authority,career
lines, and associational linkages.2 More broadly, great dif-
ferences in the academic life often appear between the let-
ters and science departments and the many professional
school domains in which a concern for the ways and needs
of an outside profession must necessarilybe combined with
the pursuit of science and truth for its own sake. Far from
the popular images of Mr. Chips chatting up undergrad-
uates and of Einsteinian, white-haired, remote scholars
dreaming up esoteric mathematical equations are the
realities of academic work that helps prepare school
teachers, librarians, social workers, engineers, computer
experts, architects,nurses, pharmacists,business managers,
lawyers, and doctors-and, in some academic locales, also
morticians, military personnel, auto mechanics, airport
technicians, secretaries,lathe operators,and cosmetologists.
As Robert Wiebe (1967) and Walter Metzger (1987) have
noted in historical detail, American higher education has
been generous to a fault in admitting former outside fields
into the academy, thereby administering a dose of legiti-
macy.
Because researchis the first priorityof the leading univer-
sities, the disciplinary differentiation of every modern
system of higher education is self-amplifying.The American
system is currently the extreme case of this self-ampli-
fication: Its great size, decentralization,diversity, and com-
petitiveness magnify the pursuit of new knowledge. The
reward system for this self-amplificationbegan to emerge
a century ago, when Johns Hopkins and other new upstart
universities competitively prompted Eliot at Harvard and
others in the old colleges of the day to speed up the nas-
cent evolution from the age of the college to the age of the
university. This evolution turned professors loose to pur-
sue specialized research and to teach specialized subjects
at the newly created graduate level, even as students were
turned loose to pick and choose in an array of under-
graduate courses that was to become ever more bewilder-
ing. The reward system of promoting academics on the
grounds of research and published scholarship has become
more deeply rooted in the universities, and would-be uni-
versities and leading 4-year colleges, with every passing
decade. The many proliferatingspecialties of the disciplines
are like tributariesflowing into this mammoth river of the
research imperative.
The most serious operational obstacles to this research-
driven amplification are the limitations of funding and the
institutional need to teach undergraduates and beginning
graduate students with packages of introductory materials
that they can understand. Then, too, there remains in the
Americansystem the long-standing belief in the importance
of undergraduate liberal or general education. The saving
remnant of academics who uphold the banners of liberal
and general education are able to sally forth in full cry
periodically-the 1920s, the late 1940s, the 1980s-to group
some specialties into more general course offerings, narrow
the options in distribution requirements from, say, 400 to
100 courses, insist that teaching take priorityover research,
and in general raise a ruckus about the dangers of the
JUNE-JUL Y 1989
specialized mind. Meanwhile, however, campus promotion
committees continue their steady scrutiny of the record of
research and scholarship. Central administratorswork ac-
tively to build an institutional culture of academic first-
rateness as that is defined competitively across the nation
and even internationally on the basis of the reputation of
noted scholars. Sophisticated general educators and liberal
arts proponents in the universities recognize the primacy
of the substantiveimpulse and learn how to work incremen-
tally within its limits.
Institutional Differentiation
As powerful as are the self-amplifying disciplinary dif-
ferences in dividing the professoriate,institutionaldifferen-
tiationnow plays an even more importantrole. Useful classi-
fications of the 3,400 accredited institutions in American
higher education now run to 20 categories of majortypes-
and still leave unidentified such important subtypes as
historicallyblack colleges, women's colleges, and Catholic
colleges (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, 1987). The creation of individual niches within
the types has become a high art, especially among private
universities and colleges but not limited to them-a self-
amplifying tendency propelledby competitionfor resources,
clientele, and reputation.The extensive differentiationplaces
most academics in settings other than that of the research
university. We find a third of them in public and private
4-year colleges and ""comprehensivecolleges," numbering
together about 1,200, that offer degree work as far as the
master's. Another fourth to a third are to be found in the
nearly 1,400 community colleges.
These major locales exhibit vast differences in the very
basis of the academic life, namely, the balance of effort be-
tween teaching and research. Teaching loads in the leading
universities come in at around 4 to 6 hours a week, tailing
down to 2 to 3 hours-a class a week, a seminar a week-
more often than rising above 6. The reciprocalis that faculty
commonly expect to spend at least half their time in re-
search, alone or in the company of a few advanced graduate
students. We need not stray very far, however, before we
encounter teaching loads that are 50%, 100%, and 200%
higher. What are called "1doctorate-granting universities,"
rather than "research universities," exact teaching loads of
9 to 12 hours. So too for liberal arts colleges, especially out-
side the top 50. In comprehensivecolleges, loads of 12 hours
a week in the classroom are common. In turn, in the com-
munity colleges, the standard climbs to 15 hours, and loads
of 18 and 21 hours are not unknown. And as we move from
the top of the institutional hierarchy to the bottom, faculty
involvement shifts from advanced students to beginning
students; from highly selective students to open-door
clientele; from young students in the traditionalcollege age
group to a mix of students of all ages in short-term voca-
tional programs as well as in course work leading toward
a bachelor's degree. In the community colleges, students
in the college-transfer track are now numerically over-
shadowed by students in terminalvocationalprograms,and
both are frequentlyoutnumberedby nonmatriculatedadults
who turn "college" into "community center."
The burdens of remedial education are also much heavier
as we descend the hierarchy.The open-door approach,stan-
dard in 2-year colleges and also operational in 4-year col-
leges that take virtuallyall comers, confrontscollege teachers
5
with students in the classroom who are still operating at
a secondary-school, and even an elementary-school, level.
Then, to add insult to injury, as we descend the hierarchy,
we encounter more part-time academic work. During the
last two decades, the ranks of the part-timershave swollen
to 200,000 or so, a third of the total academic workforce,
with heavy concentrations in the less prestigious colleges
and especially in community colleges, where a half or more
of the faculty commonly operate on a part-time schedule.
At the extreme opposite end of the institutional hierar-
chy from those who serve primarilyin the graduate schools
and graduate-levelprofessionalschools in the majoruniver-
sities are the full-time and part-time teachers in English or
mathematics in downtown community colleges who teach
introductory and subintroductory courses over and over
again-the rudiments of English composition, the first
course in mathematics-to high school graduates who need
remediation and to adults struggling with basic literacy. As
faculty pointed out in interviews, "scholars" are then
transformedinto "mere teachers," serving in a fashion more
similar to high school teaching than to university work.
With the very nature of academic work varying enor-
mously across the many types of institutions that make up
Americanpostsecondaryeducation, other dimensions of the
academic life run on a parallel course. If we examine the
cultures of the institutions by discussing with faculty
members their basic academic beliefs, we find different
worlds. Among the leading research universities, the dis-
cipline is front and center, the institution is prized for its
reputation of scholarship and research, and peers are the
primary reference group. A professor of physics will say:
"What I value the most is the presence of the large number
and diverse collection of scientists who are constantly do-
ing things that I find stimulating." A professor of biology
tells us that his university "has a lot of extremely good
departments . . . there are a lot of fascinating, interesting
people here." A political scientist adds that what he values
most "is the intellectuallevel of the facultyand the graduate
students .... Good graduate students are very important
to me personally and always have been, and having col-
leagues that are smart is important." And a professor of
English told us that his institution "is a first-rate uni-
versity . . . we have a fine library, and we have excellent
teachers here, and we have first-ratescholars." Academics
in this favored site have much with which to identify. They
are proud of the quality they believe surrounds them, ex-
periencing it directly in their own and neighboring depart-
ments and inferring it indirectly from institutional reputa-
tion. The strong symbolic thrust of the institution incor-
porates the combined strengths of the departments that in
turn represent the disciplines. Thus, for faculty, disciplinary
and institutional cultures converge, a happy state indeed.
The leading private liberal arts colleges provide a second
favored site. Here, professors often waxed lyrical in inter-
views about the small college environmenttailoredto under-
graduate teaching: "It is a very enjoyable setting. The
students are-the students we get in physics-a delight to
work with"; "I can't put it in a word, but I think that it
is one of the least constraining environments I know of";
"it is a better form of life"; or, "My colleagues are fantastic.
The people in this departmentare sane, which in an English
department is not always the case." These institutions re-
tain the capacity to appear as academic communities, not
- 6 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER -
bureaucracies, in their overall integration and symbolic
unity.
But soon we encounter sites where faculty members are
troubled by inchoate institutionalcharacterand worry about
the quality of their environment. In the lesser universities,
and especially in the comprehensive colleges that have
evolved out of a teachers-collegebackground,at the second,
third, and fourth levels of the institutional hierarchy, the
setting was often summed as follows:
I thinkthe most difficultthing aboutbeing at an institu-
tion like [this one] is that it has a difficulttime coming
to termswith itself. I think the more establishedinstitu-
tions with strongacademicbackgroundsdon't have the
problemthatan institutionthatprettymuchis in the mid-
dle range of higher educationalinstitutionsaround the
country does. I'm not saying that [this institution]is a
bad institution,but it certainlydoesn't have the quality
students, the qualityfaculty,the qualityprogramsof the
University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale .... When it talks
about standards,what sort of standards?When it talks
aboutpracticality,how practicaldoes it have to be? ....
It doesn't have a strong sense of tradition."
Compared to the research universities, the overall institu-
tional culture is weaker and less satisfying for many facul-
ty members, at the same time that disciplinary identifica-
tions are weakened as heavy teaching loads suppress re-
search and its rewards.
In these middle-level institutions, professors often spoke
of their relationship with students as the thing they value
most. Students begin to replace peers as the audience of
first resort. That shift is completed in the community col-
leges, with the identificationsof facultyreachinga high point
of student-centeredness. In a setting that is distinctly op-
posed to disciplinary definitions of quality and excellence,
pleasures and rewards have to lie in the task of working
with poorly prepared students who pour in through the
open door, for example: "We are a practicalteaching col-
lege. We serve our community and we serve . . . the stu-
dents in our community, and given them a good, basic,
strong education .... We are not sitting here on our high
horses looking to publish"; and "I really do like to teach,
and this place allows me to teach. It doesn't bog me down
with having to turn out papers." In the communitycolleges,
the equity values of open door and open access have some
payoff as anchoring points in the faculty culture. But in the
overall institutional hierarchy, where the dominant values
emphasize quality, selection, and advanced work, the com-
munity college ideology can play only a subsidiaryrole. The
limitations cannot be missed: "It would be nice to be able
to teach upper division classes."
As for work and culture, so go authority, careers, and
associational life. To sum the story on authority, at the top
of the institutional hierarchy faculty influence is well and
strong. Many individuals have strong personal bargaining
power; departments and professional schools are strong,
semiautonomous units; and all-campusfaculty bodies have
dominant influence in personnel and curriculardecisions.
University presidents speak lovingly of the faculty as the
core of the institution and walk gently around entrenched
faculty prerogatives. But as we descend the hierarchy, fac-
ulty authority weakens and managerialismincreases. Top-
down command is noticeably stronger in the public com-
prehensive colleges, especially when their genetic imprint
is that of a teachers college. The 2-year colleges, having
evolved mainly out of secondarysystems and operating,like
schools, under local trustees, are quite managerial. Faculty
then feel powerless, even severely put upon. Their answer
has been unionization. The further down the hierarchy of
prestige we go, the more widespread do unions become,
especially among public-sector institutions.
To sum the associational life of faculty: In the leading
universities, faculty interactwith one another across institu-
tional boundaries in a bewildering network of disciplinary
linkages: formal and informal;large and small; visible and
invisible; local, regional, national, and international.When
university specialists find "monster meetings" not to their
liking, they go to participatein a smaller division or section
that best represents their specific interests, or, as of late,
they find kindred souls in small, autonomous meetings of
several dozen people. The jet set is everywhere, from phys-
icists pursuing high-energy physics to professors of English
off to a conference in Paris on structuralism. As we move
down the hierarchy, however, there is less reason to be in-
volved, less to learn that is relevant to one's everyday life,
and the travel money is gone from the institutionalbudget.
Then, academics do not go to national meetings, or they
go only if the national association comes to their part of the
country and develops special sessions on teaching-or they
break away to form associations appropriate to their sec-
tor. Community college teachers have been developing
associations in such broad areas as the social sciences and
the humanities and in such special areas of teaching as
mathematics and biology, and doing so on a home-city or
home-region as well as national basis.
Different worlds, small worlds. The institutionaldifferen-
tiation interactswith the disciplinarydifferentiationin a self-
amplifying fashion that steadily widens and deepens the
matrix of differences.
What Integrates?
If academiclife in Americais so divided, and the futureprom-
ises even greater fragmentation, does any integration ob-
tain? I mentioned at the outset that common values and ex-
periences recede. When we searched in faculty interviews
for common beliefs, we found some possible cultural link-
ages in widely used expressions. As faculty members at-
tempted to formulatewhat professorshave in common, they
turned often to expressions about serving knowledge,
searching for answers, and striving for new understanding.
We frequently encountered norms of academic honesty in
which plagiarism-the stealing of someone else's intellec-
tual property-is the worst crime of all. The ideology of
academic freedom was often raised, with personal freedom
portrayed as an extremely attractiveaspect of academic life
that, like recognition, sometimes serves in lieu of material
rewards.
But we had to scrap to find values that might still be
widely shared, sensing that so often the same words had
different meanings. Academic freedom means in one con-
text primarily the right to pursue research and publish as
you please; in another, the right to give failing grades and
the right not to punch in and out on a time clockfor so many
hours on campus each day. The concern about plagiarism
drops off sharply among those in all-teaching settings; the
norms of academic honesty then more often refer to fair
grading and fair treatment of students. In short, the ongo-
JUNE-JULY 1989
ing differentiationnot only erodes common values but also
gives stated common values different meanings in different
contexts.
Because this is the case, a search for common values is
not now the best way to identify linkages among professors.
The claim that academics must and should find their way
back to agreement on core values becomes more unrealistic
with each passing year. Instead, as commonness recedes,
we have to determine how "unity in diversity" comes
about. One path to such unity is normative systems that
hook self-interestto larger institutionalchariots. In the nor-
mal course of their work, biologists or political scientists or
literature professors can serve simultaneously their own
achievement, the progress of their department and dis-
cipline, and the education of the young, the advancement
of scholarship, and other ideals that give meaning to the
academicworld. The brightside of modern professionalism,
especially its academicversion, is that self-regarding,other-
regarding, and ideal-regardinginterests can be blended and
simultaneously served. (These three forms of interest have
been brilliantlyconceptualized in Mansbridge, 1983.) In an
age of specialization, academic callings are constructed
primarily in the many cultural homes of the individual
disciplines. Tunnel by tunnel, the disciplines qua profes-
sions serve as critical centers of meaning and as primary
devices for linkage into the larger world.
Further,the disciplinesdo not exist simply as isolated tun-
nels, linking individuals in parallel chains that never meet.
Both in their coverage of empirical domains and as modes
of reasoning, they overlap. Michael Polanyi (1967) has
acutely observed that modern science consists of "chains
of overlapping neighborhoods" (p. 72). Donald T. Camp-
bell (1969)has stressed that a comprehensive social science,
or any other large domain of academic knowledge, is "a
continuous texture of narrow specialties" (p. 328). Multi-
ple specialties overlap much like the scales on the back of
a fish. That overlap produces "a collective communication,
a collective competence and breadth" (Campbell, p. 330).
In attempting to figure out how cultural integration may
coexist with diversity in a highly differentiated society,
Diana Crane (1982) has observed that the social system of
science is an appropriate model: "Contemporary science
comprises hundreds of distinct specialities,but each special-
ity has connections, both intellectual and social, with other
specialities .... Cultural integration occurs because of
overlapping memberships among culturalcommunities that
lead to the disseminationof ideas and values" (p. 239). What
we find, in science and in academia, are "interlocking
cultural communities" (p. 241).
In the subcultures of academe, it is a long way from
physics and chemistry to political science and sociology, let
alone history and literature.As culturalcommunities, how-
ever, physics and chemistry overlap with mathematics,
which connects to statistics, both of which in turn link im-
portantly to the "hard" social sciences of economics and
psychology. They in turn shade into the softer disciplines
of political science, sociology, and anthropology, fields that
readily shade into the perspectives of history and then fur-
ther on into the humanities. Also, more broadly, the let-
ters and science disciplines serve as academic links to pro-
fessional fields. They contributesubstantive materials;and,
as the "basic" disciplines, they continue to define what is
scholarly.
7
 Our imagery of culturaloverlap is also heightened when
we see the academicworld stretchingfrom center to periph-
ery in the form of institutionalas well as disciplinarychains.
Institutionally, the hard core of academic values in the
American professoriate is found in the leading research
universitiesand top liberalarts colleges. The firstexemplifies
modern science and advanced scholarship; the second up-
holds the much-respected tradition of liberal education for
undergraduates. These locales are centers whose cultural
influence radiates first to adjacent types of institutions and
then in weakening rays to institutional sectors more di-
vorced in character.The top 10 universities are a powerful
cultural magnet to the second 10, the top 20 to the top 50,
the recognized universities to the many comprehensive col-
leges that so dearly want to be recognized as universities.
The many different types of institutions do not operate as
watertight compartments-witness the high transferability
of course credit-but rather overlap to the point of heavily
confusing the efforts of classifiers to draw lines between
them.
The analytical handle is the idea of integration through
overlap. Then we no longer need to think, as observers or
participants,that integrationcan come about only by means
of some combination of identical socialization, similarityof
CALLFOR MEMBERINPUT
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8 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER*
task, commonly held values, and united membership in a
grand corps or a single association. Academics need not
think that they must somehow pull themselves together
around a top-down pronouncement of a fixed set of values
and a universal core curriculum,swimming agains the tides
of history and seeking a return to a golden age that never
was. As we probe the nature of the modern academic life,
especially in America, it is much more fruitful to grasp that
integration can come from the bit-by-bitoverlap of narrow
memberships and specific identities. Specialties and dis-
ciplines, and whole colleges and universities, may serve as
mediating institutions that tie individuals and small groups
into the whole of the system.
For a profession that is so naturally pluralistic, and for
which the future promises an ever-widening complexity of
task and structure, a large dollop of pluralist theory is not
a bad idea. The many dualities of commitment to discipline
and institution,and the many linkagesamong units on these
primary lines of affiliation, provide an academic version of
the great federal motto: E pluribusunum. Whatever the
future unities of the academiclife in America,they will have
to be rooted in the developmental differences that inhere
in the ways of modern academe.
Notes
'Unless otherwise indicated, all empirical materials reported in this
paper come from a 1973-75 study that centered on 170 intensive fac-
ulty interviews in the six fields of physics, biology, political science,
English, business, and medicine, in 16 universities and colleges, chosen
nationally to represent six types of institutions, from leading research
universities to community colleges. The interviews, taped and tran-
scribed, led to lengthy protocols that could be variously grouped and
analyzed by discipline and institutional type. Some quantitative data
from the 1984 Carnegie faculty survey were also available and used.
Fuller description of the research study can be found in The Academic
Life (1987), Introduction and Appendix A.
2These five categories of work, culture, authority, career, and associa-
tion, defined as primary dimensions of academic professionalism, are
developed as central chapters in TheAcademicLife (1987) to group and
analyze the rich materials obtained in the 1983-85 field interviews.
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