Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century [Paperback]

David Frank (Author), Jay Gabler (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (July 25 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0804753768
ISBN-13: 978-0804753760
Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Shipping Weight: 295 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #585,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #73 in Books > Nonfiction > Education > Education Theory > Organizations & Institutions
- #74 in Books > Professional & Technical > Education > Administration > Organizations & Institutions

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Review

"This is an extraordinary, pioneering book that should become an instant classic in the field. The data set is remarkable and comparative in scope. The theoretical argument is bold but persuasive. It is rooted in modern institutional theory and shows off the power of this line of thinking. It also shatters a number of myths about the academy during the twentieth century."—Comparative Education Review

"This is gripping stuff: the claim is that, over time, universities have grown to resemble one another, in terms of how they allocate their faculty resources and thereby demonstrate dedication to upholding the various disciplines. More centrally, from Frank and Gabler's perspective, this trend is a clear manifestation of the global macro-level phenomena they see in their broadly international data."—Science and Public Policy

"I found this book absolutely engrossing and enlightening."—Review of Higher Education
"[Frank and Gabler's] contribution is remarkable for its holistic study of global higher education."—Education Review

"This book offers plenty of detailed information to readers who are interested in shifts among the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences... in universities all around the world."—Studies in Higher Education

"A complex work that will be of interest to scholars in many fields, as well as to any critics of higher education who wish to embrace a more thoughtful view of the reasons behind curriculum change than some we have seen in the past."—College and Research Libraries

Product Description

Current conversations on the state of academia contain a broad sense of crisis over changes in the body of university knowledge—the decline of literature, the unbridling of ethnic studies, the growth of various applied programs, and so on. Much of the concern revolves around a perceived deterioration of the academic core in which, the thinking goes, the university's teaching and research priorities are increasingly compromised by external financial and political interests.

With data on faculty and course composition over the twentieth century for a global sample of universities, this book provides an examination unprecedented in scope and scale of changes in academia. The authors document the changing emphases accorded the branches of learning, the applied and basic divisions, and the disciplinary fields. They find deep transformations, as anticipated, but offer a new explanation for these shifts. Changes in academic focus are less the work of outside interest groups, but instead are cultural maps to the altering features of globally institutionalized understandings of reality.

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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful and thought provoking read, Feb 1 2007

By Michael J. Rosenfeld "scholar" - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century (Paperback)

Anyone who has spent time in a university eventually gets to thinking: why is this university organized in this way? Why does it offer the classes that it does? One simple answer is the functional answer: universities teach us what we need to know. But if the university curriculum fills a functional role, shouldn't the curriculum in Kenya be different from the Harvard curriculum? It turns out that college curricula are nearly the same all around the world. I found that this book offered a global and suprising thoughtful perspective on the history of the university, which is really just the history of how we all think. The writing was superb.

I was a little surprised that social science has grown so much (in terms of faculty positions) in the past century, and natural science has not. I would have thought that the natural sciences were coming to dominate everything, but I was wrong.

I think this book will take its rightful place right at the top of intellectual histories of the university, and therefore of human knowledge. For another great perspective on the history of disciplines and professions, see Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions.

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