Abstract

Higher education is a social structure for the control and distribution of advanced thought and technique. Its basic organizational forms are locations for discovering, conserving, refining, transmitting, and applying advanced ideas and skills, with the handling of knowledge materials thereby made a common thread in the many specific activities of academic workers. Compared to other social institutions and to education at lower levels, the configuration of tasks is uniquely knowledge intensive and knowledge extensive. In every national system, a set of operational units concentrates intensively on specialized fields of knowledge across a spectrum that may range from archeology to zoology and includes dozens of specialties as diverse as civil engineering, French literature, constitutional law, high-energy physics, and child psychology. This highly unusual broad coverage of finely tuned specialties grows in scale along with the general enlargement of knowledge in society. The inordinate and growing complexity of tasks, while long sensed by thoughtful practitioners and observers, has in the main been obscured by simplistic statements about the purposes of higher education. Doctrines that define the university as an intellectual community confronting major issues, or state the purposes of higher education as teaching, research, and service, serve poorly as accounts of what is done. At best, they function as useful ideologies that throw a net of legitimacy over diverse activities. Around the multitude of knowledge tasks, each national system of higher education has a historically derived arrangement. The specific country structures vary in such characteristics as breadth of coverage and the inclusion or exclusion of particular fields and points of view within them. Of primary importance is the prevailing array of operating units, the primary differentiated structure, that historically has been granted, or has acquired, control over the numerous tasks. How is the work of research, scholarship, and training in so many fields distributed to groups? The patterned division of labor conditions a wide range of specific issues, such as access, certification, and graduate employment, and determines considerably the nature of the problems of coordination and control. All problems of serious re-form are just that, with the redivision and recombination of tasks generally at stake.

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