The University: Exalted Institution and Ruined Organization

The university has risen over nearly a thousand years, growing from a tiny Western outcrop between church and state into a great global behemoth—key to culture, action, and stratification. Even as it has grown and flourished, the university has been shadowed by relentless attacks. We seek here to explain the seeming paradox. Our starting point is a distinction between institution and organization. The university institution is defined by religious-like cultural claims regarding the comprehensibility of the universe and the comprehending capacities of the humans within it; university organizations represent manifestations of those commitments in the real world. The institution is buffered from attacks: it shares a cultural base with Western and now world society, and its claims transcend scuffles with everyday forms of understanding. University organizations are exposed to attacks: each instance of the great institution fails to fulfill its magnificent promises, especially as those promises aggrandize over the Modern Period under decentralized conditions. The attacks reasonably call attention to the gulf between myth and reality, clustering around students and professors, who operationalize the promise of comprehending capacities, and research and teaching, which operationalize the promise of comprehensibility. But they are often hyperbolic in tone, as a series of exhibits from Europe and the U.S. over several centuries shows. The exhibits underscore two main themes: attacks focus on specific organizational failures, not on the overall institution of the university; and attacks focus on those aspects of university organization that link most directly to the great institution, i.e., the sediments of comprehensibility and comprehension—students, professors, teaching, research. The exhibits furthermore suggest common determinants of attack—grand claims, lax standards, and multitudinous interpreters. In aggregate, the attacks convey a profound sense of crisis; but one by one, they reveal exaggeration and embellishment. Notwithstanding its millennium in the rising sun, the university as an institution is not inviolable. It has been challenged before in times of revolution, and its triumph is contingent on the endurance and extension of the Western-origin cultural mantle. Were that mantle to crumble—as may be happening now—the thunder of attacks might be the clamorous prelude to the silence of demise.

Duke Scholars

Author Daniel Scott Smith Sociology