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.

Clark's painstaking analysis of this question holds no surprises for anyone who has spent a lifetime in academe, but it includes a great deal that is not understood by the politicians and bureaucrats who now have such influence over the future of higher education. He explains how it is much more than basic facilities that bring scholars together into universities. They share certain beliefs; they have common problems of divided loyalty; they cannot work well unless they are allowed to devise for themselves a very peculiar structure of power and authority, one in which the process of decision-making does not descend in decrees from above but arises on the "shop floor" and percolates upwards, to reach (paradoxically) the desk of the individual who, de jure, is the boss of the institution. Prominent among the beliefs is a common purpose: to transmit, by teaching, the orthodoxy of the discipline and to generate, by research, a rigorously controlled system of dissent from orthodoxy. There is a mystique about this and there is intense loyalty to an institution that nurtures this mystique. But these communities of scholars have to come to terms with two often conflicting loyalties.

 请指正：

对任何终身投入在学术中的人而言，克拉克对这个问题煞费苦心的分析结论是顺理成章的，但对现在能够影响高等教育未来的政客和官僚而言，却包含很多不明所以的东西。他解释了基本设施之外其他更多的东西如何吸引学者聚集在学校。他们拥有同样的信仰；他们虽然忠于不同的对象，背后却又共性问题；除非允许他们设计一种特定的权力和权威结构，在这种结构里，决策过程不能是以法令形式从上下达，而是在教学和科研底层一线升起，然后向上渗透，最终达到机构负责人的办公桌上，只有在这种结构里，他们才能有效工作。在这些信仰中最重要的是共同目标：由教学传递学科的正统知识，和由研究生产不同于学科正统知识却严密规范的知识体系。教学传授和科研生产是有奥妙的，对培植这一奥妙的机构要有强烈的忠诚。但学者共同体不得不处理两种处于冲突状态的忠诚。