Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University Robert N. Matuozzi Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. By William Clark . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 662 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-226-10921-6. Using Max Weber to explain the role of rationalization, bureaucracy, and charisma in academic life, William Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University examines European universities in medieval society and their emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as modern state-administered research institutions. This transformation occurred largely in Protestant German lands and is now the model for the academic institutions throughout much of the world. Early modern academic regimes reflected the "juridico-ecclesiastical" power of medieval church and state. By contrast, modern institutions were reconfigured by the political-economic imperatives of the secular "policing" state—by the ministry and the market—or what is now managerial and bureaucratic capitalism. Clark describes these changes in the academic order through the material practices associated with an "armory of little tools—catalogues, charts, tables (of paper), reports, questionnaires, dossiers and so on" (6). The impact of the ministry and the market on academic practices was pronounced, although never total, as Jesuit universities and the Oxbridge colleges in England opted to retain certain medieval practices well into the modern period. [End Page 103] Clark traces the valorization of charismatic authority in academic life in a variety of contexts. In the traditional university, he says, authority inhered in the cloistered academic collective and was manifested in external signs and rituals. These consisted of clothing, collegial voting prerogatives, books and furniture, a static body of texts, and nepotism and patronage. Charisma and authority in the modern research university are split, with the individual professor seen as the embodiment of rationally administered authority that resides outside of the advisory collegial body. In the modern regime authority resides with the sovereign and his or her minister and later on with a provost and board of overseers who manage an administrative echelon. The professor in the modern academic collective thus achieves success and legitimacy according to meritocratic criteria; in theory, at least, this process endorses a degree of anonymity and objectivity in accordance with administrative imperatives and goals. The medieval academician operated in a relatively homogeneous cultural space in which public and private roles were fused. By contrast, the modern research university, a site of increased ideological and bureaucratic surveillance, intensifies the modern schizoid split between public and private roles. Charisma in the medieval academic regime was rooted in speech, tradition, and orthodoxy; in the modern order charisma inheres primarily in publishing, originality, and innovation. But real changes in academic life have taken hold. Regulations governing academic appointments, for example, have provided a check on the ancient practice of nepotism and its convoluted subterfuges. The institution of academic calendars and the replacement of private endowments by public funding have meant that professors can no longer take decades to give a public lecture on two or three texts. Clark's chapter on the evolution of the college library catalog neatly encapsulates his theme of the medieval university in transition. He observes that during the Baroque period universities "did not consistently distinguish between libraries, museums, cabinets, and often not between those and archives and treasuries" (298). As an aside, his description of early modern archives is enough to make today's archivists cringe. In medieval libraries books were chained to desks and referenced according to their donor (the collector's "juridical estate"), often housed in "treasure rooms" or cabinets, without further classification. Shelf lists simply described the physical locations of books that had been acquired in a haphazard manner. In the early modern library catalog an epistemic tension therefore developed between collector and academic discipline. In the Enlightenment catalog this tension in epistemic library regimes resurfaces, this time regarding the systematic catalog versus the author catalog, with nineteenth-century Romantic ideology privileging the author. Wilhelm von Humboldt's vision of a comprehensive, unified academic order at the University of Berlin (ca. 1810) had parallels in library theory and practice, culminating in the unified library catalog that was searchable by both academic discipline and author. Thus...