As the leaves appear on the trees, as the lawns turn green again, as the libraries glow with lamplight late into the night and exams approach, the New York Times publishes another article urging the reinvention of the American university. Deans and professors will print it out and make a mental note to reread it over the summer. Parents and trustees may come to graduation ceremonies clutching a copy and wanting to talk about it. It may sink in. If the economic situation gets worse, it may come in handy as a set of pretexts. I'd like to try to answer some of the article's claims, speculate about its effects, and situate it in a sociology of knowledge about the academy.

The most attention-getting part of Mark C. Taylor's op-ed piece is the call to abolish tenure and academic departments. He thinks a university should consist of “problem-centered programs” assembled on the quick and periodically evaluated for relevance. I personally would probably enjoy that, though I might not like moving house every few years. But I doubt it would be good for higher education generally.

“Down with tenure! Down with departments!” These are not new ideas; they've been around for as long as tenure and the department system, in other words, since the professionalization of university teachers circa 1900. The reasonings are the same too: I can show you a stack of clippings from the early part of the 20th century in which departments are said to be fortresses resistant to change, tenure is said to provide a comfy featherbed for do-nothing professors, and research for the sake of gaining tenure is described as the acquisition of mastery over a meaninglessly narrow field of information. Surely Professor Taylor, whose books show him to be a well-read and agile mind, can't believe that uttering these stock critiques is anything but a ritual occurrence in an oft-repeated scenario.

And that scenario is: calling the university to account, demanding that it serve the immediate purposes of society (or-- put your sociology of knowledge hat on-- of a fraction of people claiming to speak on behalf of society). Those purposes, it is claimed, should take priority over any purposes the university, or its departments, or its professors, might have devised for themselves. The accusation of self-indulgence and immobility leveled at departments and professors serves to discredit in advance any defense they might mount. Put them on the run, cut off their oxygen, redirect the energy and resources of the university to the things that we all know are crucial, and let the ones who don't get with the program find whatever jobs they can. And naturally, the prime targets of critique and candidates for removal are scholars and teachers of the humanities-- of the stuff that is perhaps true, beautiful and good, but mainly historical and thought to be useless.

At various moments in the twentieth century the great causes for which the university was to be mobilized were: war work (ideological support in the form of courses that affirmed the nobility of our war aims; technological support and design of new weapons; anthropological support of the investigation of the enemy's mentality); moral rearmament in the fight against Communism; “relevance,” in the vocabulary of the diffuse dissatisfaction of the Vietnam era and just afterwards; career preparation, as the postwar plenty turned into an increasingly steep competition for the bigger rewards. And I'm leaving out purposes that galvanized subsets of the academy, colleges sponsored by churches, for example. The list is not meant to be exhaustive: I just want to call attention to the repeated demand that is addressed to the university to respond to the present crisis, whatever it is. There's nothing wrong with society, or specific actors in society, making such demands. Higher education is a precious resource, to be used and developed, not just admired. But the air of authority with which such demands are uttered doesn't automatically persuade. Consider, for example, the way that the majority of the Vietnam generation of students and professors refused to be mobilized for the sake of defeating communism, and answered with their symmetrical but antithetical demand for “relevance,” that is, courses and programs that would teach them how to live otherwise than as part of the national “machine.” Nobody can leave the university alone.

So take the gesture with a grain of salt: it's utterly conventional to say that the academy is failing to rise to the demands of the “real world” and to demand that it convert or die.

It is similarly conventional to put the blame on tenure and departments. Historically, tenure and departments are tightly related. Get out your Max Weber: it's all about the autonomy of professional communities. A department is simply the group of people who are qualified, by being experts in a similar domain of knowledge, to pass judgment on your work and vote on your tenure (that is, your career-long security of employment). By creating departments, deans and presidents of universities recognized that they were not always the experts, that their administrative reach did not automatically empower them to say what was good scholarship. They left that up to the departments; and to this day, departments feel injury and outrage when a dean goes against their vote.

The creation of a department, then, means that a university has agreed to hand over a certain packet of resources to be dedicated to a domain of knowledge and managed by the people who know about it. Now of course there are rich departments and poor departments; big ones and small ones; powerful ones and weak ones. But it is useful to think of any department, even the weakest and poorest, as a resource and as an invested trust. The university deliberately makes it harder for itself to turn that resource into fungible funds. When a department moves to grant tenure and the university approves, a financial resource is put aside for the long term and a scholarly resource is secured. Presumably this is a good deal for both parties, or it wouldn't happen. Of course you are thinking of your colleague X, who is just sitting on his tenured post and doing nothing but mowing his lawn regularly every Tuesday, but the system as a whole is supposed to absorb anecdotal deficiencies like that one. For every X there are presumably numerous people like Colleague Y, whose institutional loyalty and scholarly reputation repay the university's investment in her-- repay it so well that the university is willing to tolerate a certain number of X's in order to get the desirable Y's, by offering them the same deal. And for every weak or dysfunctional department there are some that make good hires, attract smart students, build glowing reputations, and so forth. The fact that some departments turn into sloughs of despond doesn't negate the usefulness of having departments.

If you could know in advance who is going to turn out X and who is going to turn out Y, the game would be different. The value of being certain that someone is a Y accounts for the high price of mid-career outside offers, and for the feeling-- we all have it at times, especially in mid-career when nobody has made us an offer-- that our home institutions don't appreciate us adequately. Similarly with departments: nobody knows in advance whether it will turn out to be a good bet to have a department of Geography or German. Sometimes it was a great idea at one time, then a poor idea for a while, then a good idea again as circumstances changed or the people in the department changed the way they did work in their field. Universities have more or less of an ability to hold their cards, depending on their foresight, the depth of their pockets, the degree to which they copy the behavior of their rivals.

Taylor's account is gloomier. He sees the department system as leading to

Taylor wants the department to be abolished and replaced with short-term working groups, hired to deal with a particular crisis and disbanded when the urgency of the crisis is past. But who's to say what counts as a critical topic, and who's to say who the experts are? It looks as if, with departments gone, the arbiter of academic quality is now going to be the dean. The dean will not only handle the administrative and financial operations, but will decide what the purposes of the university are at any given moment and how those purposes are to be accomplished. Imagine the results: the dean becomes an intellectual entrepreneur and the American university turns into a landscape of competing consulting firms, a thousand self-designated McKinseys without clients. (Or with one ultimate client, as in the wartime basic-science effort.) I have known many admirable deans, but I like checks and balances. And a tenured faculty that can say No to the dean without fear of being shown the door is the way to keep power from accumulating in one pair of hands. It's not just self-interest that makes tenured professors resistant; or at least it's a legitimate self-interest that benefits others beside themselves.

Taylor bemoans the increasing specialization of academic research (a theme already familiar in Max Weber's time), but his remedy is “to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems.” This isn't going to be controversial, because we already do that: in conferences, in edited volumes, in journal numbers, in humanities centers, in co-advising dissertations, in hallway conversations. I'm sure that, to be fairer to Taylor's colleague with the Duns Scotus dissertation student, if you asked what that amazingly narrow topic was good for, the answer would have been couched in this language of interdisciplinary expansion: the small thing opens out onto the history of communication, the practices of monastic life, the spread of ideas from the Greek to the Arabic to the Latin language-spheres-- in short, it looks narrow and nerdy but the trick is to show that it isn't.

Taylor would abolish a structure that, though imperfect, supports pretty well the kind of thing he thinks of as valuable, and replace it with something that would come and go by the individual whim of administrators. The long-term investment, and thus the stockpiling of resources against future need, that made the department a useful structure for the university, would be turned into fungible cash. Taylor, born in 1945, will not have to live long with the consequences of his recommendations, even if they are adopted wholesale tomorrow. (I was born in 1960, so I'd have another 20 years to go, but the real stakeholders are those born in 1980 and thereafter.) It would be fairer, procedurally, if the debate about whether to restructure (or abolish) academic departments and tenure were conducted by people who might have to make their careers in a possibly tenure-less academy where topics of the day are generated by little emperors who quite possibly will no longer even have newspapers and magazines to give them their ideas... — a sobering prospect. I'd hope that a wide public, including people who have not yet even become part of the present system, i.e., graduate students, would have a chance to argue and speculate together, rather than the matter being left up to those who presently have the power to make the decisions. And that leads me down a side alley of demography.

Now that the “paper of record” posts its “most e-mailed” items in a steadily refreshed ranking, the media anthropologist can just sit back and watch the automated research results pour in. Who wouldn't want to have data on the New Yorker cartoons that were most frequently clipped or xeroxed and sent to friends by the readers of that august glossy? From the kinds of items that show up and stay up on the “most e-mailed” list, we get an answer to the question asked by everyone who is concerned about the survival of newspapers and news organizations: who reads the Times online and what do they focus on? It looks to me as if they are predominantly academics or people for whom the Education section is at least as important as the Health section and the recipes. Academics, therefore, of a certain age? And whose enthusiasm for heart-healthy cauliflower casseroles is matched by their indifference to whether tenure will survive to benefit those who come after them? I hope that's not the whole demographic involved in discussing the future of the university.