Academic Career Management: The Higher Learning in the Age of Marketing

Abstract

In 1917, a student association at Munich University began sponsor ship of a series of lectures on "Intellectual Work as a Profession." The first speaker, Max Weber, lectured on academic science and scholarship: "Sci ence as a Vocation," now regarded as a classic statement of the significance of scientific and scholarly work (Weber, 1958a, pp. 129-56). After cursory ob servations on the economic conditions of academic life, the division of labor in the university, and the implications of the social organization of academia for teaching and research, Weber posed the main questions of the lecture: "What is the calling of science within the total life of humanity? And what is the value of science?" (Weber, 1958a, p. 40, translation amended). We ber conceived academic science and scholarship as a "value sphere" defined by "ultimate values"?categorical imperatives of the academic calling, the obligatory force of which does not vary with opportunities, constraints, or personal proclivities and tastes. The academic vocation is grounded in the imperatives of clarity, intellectual integrity, and the project of fashioning the world as a "cosmos of truths" based on discursive reasoning. There is no sense in which their validity can be demonstrated to unbelievers or skeptics, who may reject the academic life as banal, futile, unworthy, contemptible, or even absurd. "The various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other," a struggle that Weber regarded as irresolvable and "eternal" (Weber, 1958a, p. 149). For the academic, however, commitment to these imperatives and to the truths that can be established only by discursive reasoning is absolute.