Anatomy of higher education

Eric Ashby

The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. By Burton R. Clark.

University of California Press: 1983. Pp.315. £21.25, $32.50.

An institution for the management of knowledge has to solve a very difficult problem in the management of its own members. The scholars are differentiated into dozens of disciplines and subdisciplines.

Those in authority over them cannot possibly tell them what to do; yet someone has to allocate space, cut the financial cake into slices, provide the common services. And someone has to defend the university's interests against pressures from what is (shortsightedly) called "the outside world". Clark describes in detail the patterns of academic authority: the dictatorial professor who has the right of patronage (as is to be found in Italy); the collective control by committees of academics (as is to be found in Britain); the administrators who manage the university as a sort of holding company for semiautonomous oligarchies of faculties or colleges (as in California); the limited delegated control under a system managed by the state, where the professors are civil servants (as in France). He sees good and bad in all these patterns and wisely refrains from committing himself to preferences among them. Finally, Clark discusses change in institutions of higher education. Here, it seems, is another paradox: that they are notoriously the most exasperatingly conservative bodies and yet it is from them that the most revolutionary initiatives for changes in society come. Clark finds this puzzling, but I think the explanation may be quite simple. It is that the initiatives come from the "shop floor", from the research and writing of young people. The resistance comes from the people who have become enmeshed in the administrative network of the place or whose interests would be endangered by change. The obduracy of the University of London to reform itself is a local British example of this.

一个知识管理机构不得不解决其成员管理这一非常困难的问题，学者被分在很多学科和子学科。那些管理学者的当权者不可能告诉学者要做什么，尽管得有人分配空间，把财政资源切片分配，提供共同服务。也得有人在学校受到外界压力时维护大学的利益[1]。克拉克详尽地描述了学术权力运行的模式：如意大利式具有任免权的教授独裁模式；如英国式的学术委员会集体控制模式；如加利福尼亚那种行政人员把大学作为一种自有企业而对职员和学院进行半自治寡头模式；如法国那样在国家系统管理下的有限委托控制的模式，而教授是国家系统里公务员。他看到所有这些模式的优缺点，明智地控制自己不做偏好性评价。最后，克拉克讨论了高等教育机构的变化。这里，似乎是另一种悖论：大学以保守得令人恼火而臭名昭著，而大学里又孕育着能够引起社会变化的最具革命性的倡议。克拉克发现了这个谜题，但我认为他的解释可能太简单了，倡议是来自知识传授和科研生产的一线工作，和年轻人的研究和文章。而阻挡力量却来自陷入本校行政网络的人们，或者那些变革会危及其利益的人们。伦敦大学在改革中的顽固是英国当地的一个例子。

[1] 作为教育生态学的首倡者，Ashby认为把大学和其外界环境敌对起来，是很短视的。