The World in US Universities

By definition, universities comprise the universe of knowledge, the whole of what is known. This conceit is a challenge for academic managers. Deciding how the whole of knowledge should be approximated, and how specialist scholars should be chosen, placed, and put into commerce with one another are fundamental planning tasks for any institution of higher learning. Here we consider one aspect of this conceit: how US universities have refracted knowledge about the rest of the world, over time and into the present. We want to know how universities organize the tasks of making and disseminating scholarship about things beyond US national borders. This chapter provides an overview of three primary ways in which US universities have done this throughout their history.

We also make a novel argument about universities: they are cumulative organizations. They retain things: tenured faculty, functions, programs of study, library and museum collections, and entire means and mechanisms for producing knowledge. This tendency toward retention is exceptional in a contemporary world in which management and therapeutic experts alike preach the virtues of flexibility, downsizing, shedding baggage, and letting go. Universities' predilection for retention continues nevertheless, making them ever more complex organizations as they move through time. The implications of this accumulated complexity for the character of knowledge production and academic careers are among this book's central concerns.

To understand how university leaders and scholars make sense of the rest of the world at different moments in history, we borrow the notion of schemata from scholars in cognitive science. Schemata are "knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information." Like the image on the box of a jigsaw puzzle, a schema enables people to assemble bits of knowledge into a coherent whole. Think of academic inquiries about the rest of the world as an ever-accumulating pile of puzzle pieces. Schemata — sets of preexisting assumptions, ideas, opinions, or principles that may or may not be held consciously — enable academic planners to place those inquiries into more or less coherent intellectual and organizational designs. A schema for making sense of the world provides the default assumptions on which myriad academic decisions are made. They are as often implied as explicitly stated: subtly in evidence when (for examples) faculty and fund-raisers make arguments about what a university "needs" that it doesn't already have; when deans and provosts defend decisions about why particular faculty or endowments "belong" together; or when young scholars plot careers in light of "where the field is going." Schemata simplify otherwise daunting complexity and make it amenable for practical organizational expression at particular places and times.

Three general schemata have informed how academic leaders have conceived of the relationship between their schools and the rest of the world throughout the history of US higher education. The first is a civilizational schema that defines schools as repositories of knowledge and artifacts about other places and peoples that can usefully inform the education of young citizens. In this schema the rest of the world is imagined as a discrete number of distinct and bounded cultural, linguistic, and/or ethno-religious traditions. The second is a national schema that defines schools as consultants to the US state in its geopolitical ambitions worldwide. In this schema the rest of the world is imagined as a mosaic of nation-states clustered in "areas" of academic and political concern. The third is a global schema that defines schools as cosmopolitan agents ecumenical in patronage and borderless in reach. In this schema the rest of the world is imagined as a complex of flows — of people, capital, ideas, goods, and services — often leveraged for university benefit through myriad interorganizational joint ventures.

We refer to all three schemata in the present tense because despite their chronological emergence, no prior one disappears as a subsequent one arises. The schemata and their organizational artifacts accumulate over time, accreting a complicated intramural ecology amenable to the metaphor of a coral reef. Although the introduction of each schema might be marked by pivotal historical events — the founding of the United States, World War II, and the end of the Cold War, respectively — the transitions between schemata are not crisp. Instead universities accumulate schemata and their various organizational expressions over time.

Table 1.1 provides a summary of the arguments we elaborate in subsequent pages.

We recognize that our treatment is written at a great analytic distance. We have neither the space nor the varied expertise required to fully portray the rich historical evolution that is skeletally depicted here. Our goal is to suggest what sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki has called a "historical sociology of the present:" a critical recognition of features of the past that are implicated in contemporary institutional arrangements.

Civilizing Others and Ourselves

When we speak of a civilizational schema we refer to how American educators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the world in terms of coherent historical legacies and geographically contiguous cultural regions. This schema was both a consequence of and a contributor to the intellectual project of imperialism, which imagined modern Europe as an apex of historical evolution and an Archimedean point from which to view the rest of the world. John Willinsky has thoughtfully detailed how nineteenth-century instructional materials of all kinds helped shape Euro-American publics' perceptions of the world as divided into primitive and civilized, or East and West. Museums, gardens, maps, encyclopedias, traveling exhibitions, zoos, and botanical displays served to "educate the eye to divide the world according to the patterns of empire." In their approaches to the rest of the world, American colleges did much the same thing.

This claim may seem paradoxical given the United States' founding antipathy to empire and the regional parochialism of its schools at their founding. Congress declined to mandate Thomas Jefferson's proposal for a national university during the early years of the new republic, leaving the task of higher learning to states and local communities. Americans took up the charge with great enthusiasm. Religious pluralism meant that leaders of every Christian tradition and denomination wanted to build schools to grow their own faiths and train their own successors. Westward expansion...