action theory & the human condition

 

II – SOCIOLOGY OF HIGHER EDUCATION - 91

 

Introduction to Part II

 

PART II DEALS WTH THE SECOND of the broad empirical fields of interest mentioned in the General Introduction: the place and significance of higher education in modern society.  More generally this area is interpreted to include not only the teaching of what has been called "higher learning" but also various custodial functions and above all what has come to be called the "research function," or the "advancement of knowledge." 

 

                In my own intellectual biography this interest is in the first instance a development from my early interest in the professions in modern societies, particularly medical practice.¹  It soon became clear that a criterion of the standing of an occupational group as a profession is the requirement for its practitioners of technical training, in which the mastery of bodies of knowledge, that is, cognitive competence, has come to play a central part.  In modern societies, the acquisition of such training has become an increasingly important part of the professional complex. 

 

                Insofar as this tendency has come to be generalized, it was an obvious inference that the university had become institutionalized, as it were, as the "mother" of this institutional complex.  That is, abandoning the metaphor, the university became the primary trustee of that phase of the cultural heritage of modern societies that was important for the grounding of professional competence (granted its functions are much broader). 

 

                These interests naturally led to a larger investigation of the nature of what we came to call the "cognitive complex" within the system of action.  This complex is rooted in the cultural system itself.  But it has ramified into the other subsystems of action and into the organic and especially, within action, to the behavioral system and into the telic system.  Indeed, this complex of the human action system has become the paramount focus of the differentiation, in action systems, particularly at the cultural and social levels, of the system of higher education and its relations to other complexes such as the political and the religious.  In particular, as noted in the Introduction to Part I, in certain ways the cognitive complex has supplanted the economic complex, as the latter was characteristically emphasized in nineteenth-century thought; in my opinion this emphasis has been shared in common between the utilitarian economists and the Marxist tradition. 

 

                ¹ Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951), chap. 10, "Social Structure and Dynamic Process: The Case of Modern Medical Practice."

 

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                For the reader who takes the theoretical issues involved in the papers included in Part II most seriously, it seems particularly important to be acquainted with The American University (co-authored with Gerald M. Platt). ²  This book contains extensive discussions of the theoretical framework in terms of which I have attempted to analyze the system of higher education and its place in modern societies.  In particular, it contains a full discussion of the nature of the cognitive complex (Chapter 2), of the place and nature of the structural pattern of the collegial association, of the institutionalization of tenure and of academic freedom (Chapter 3), and of the place of inflationary and deflationary movements in the dynamic processes of the academic system (Chapter 7). 

 

                Though it was the last to be written, "The Future of the University" opens in Part II because it presents a general outline of the development, growth, and structure of modern higher education.  This chapter was first presented as a lecture at the Australian National University at Canberra and was repeated with variations in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, Australia, in 1975.  It was put into final written form after the oral presentations, and is being nearly simultaneously published with the present volume in the Australian Journal Vestes. 

 

                Whereas Chapter 5 looks toward the future of the modern university, it also attempts to sketch many of the structural features of the university and of its place in modern societies and to give a broad account of some salient features of its historical background.  It is for such reasons that it seemed appropriate to use "The Future of the University" as an introduction to the other essays in Part II. 

 

                Chapter 6, "Some Considerations on the Growth of the American System of Higher Education and Research" was written for the volume in honor of Edward Shils, edited by Terry N. Clark and Joseph Ben-David, and published by the University of Chicago Press early in 1977.  This selection is concerned with a problem in historical sociology, namely, the constellation of social forces in American society, from the end of the Civil War on, that can account for the development in the United States of a massive system of higher education and research.  This has been not merely a "mass" system, though it has been that, extending undergraduate education to the unprecedented level of slightly more that half the secondary school graduates of both sexes.  At the same time, however, the American system exhibits much qualitative variety, and it has, in its more elite sectors, reached levels of academic excellence comparable with the best anywhere in the world.  

 

                ¹ Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt, in collaboration with Neil J. Smelser, The American University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). 

 

Introduction to Part II 93

 

                Chapter 6 takes the line that this development cannot be explained by an economic interpretation, whether utilitarian or Marxist, even though, of course, without large economic resources, from both private and public sources, it could not have taken place.  Over against this, we place the view that it is necessary to invoke as a major factor in such social change the operation of a value complex in which cognitive values, as part of the largest complex of what I have called "instrumental activism," have figured prominently.  This is closely related to the famous Protestant ethic, and my insights in this connection owe a great deal to the well-known work of Robert Merton.²  

 

                Value-commitments, however, do not simply implement themselves; to suppose that they do is the idealistic fallacy.  My hypothesis in Chapter 6 is that the main implementers, especially in the early phase of institutionalization, were members of an elite class in American society who looked mainly to Europe for their models of prestige.  Particularly since formal aristocratic status was, under American conditions, denied them, they could still assimilate and promote certain cultural interests that at the time were much better represented in Europe.  These interests were above all the cognitive and the esthetic values; there was a notable wave of sponsorship of the arts, most evident in the founding of museums and symphony orchestras, as well as marked expansion of the intellectual disciplines in colleges and universities, at about the same time (the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  

 

                Two further conditions seem to have been very important.  These were, first, the extension of the range of access to higher education in accord with the democratic values so important in American society and, second, the application of the results of cognitive achievement to the practical interests of various members of the society, ranging from the ailments of the sick to the technological concerns of the military, with industrial technology in a sense standing in the middle.  Important as these "payoffs" have been, however, I do not think that their anticipation, with all the uncertainties of concrete situations, could account for the main impetus to this institutional development.  Without the value-commitments, as I have sketched them, plus the prestige rewards to be gained from their early implementation, the prospect of practical payoffs would not have brought about these changes.  

 

                ² Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Fertig, 1970).

 

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                Finally, I may note the fact that in the historic socialism-capitalism controversies, very little indeed has been said of the importance in modern society of the cognitive complex and its institutionalization.  Moreover, its reaching the point it has, seems to me to provide strong ground for the contention that the old capitalism versus socialism dilemma has in many respects become obsolete. We have come into a mode of social organization in which factors outside the ken of both camps have acquired decisive

importance. 

 

                Chapter 7, "The University 'Bundle': A Study of the Balance Between Differentiation and Integration," is essentially a theoretical analysis.  As noted in its introductory statement, this essay arose out of discussions among Neil J. Smelser, Gerald Platt, and myself about drafts of The American University, in which Smelser referred to a certain "resistance to differentiation," about the "normality" of which be raised questions.⁴ 

 

                In the background was the often expressed view that the aspect of modern society that we continually discussed as substantially increasing levels of differentiation would lead unrestrictedly to more and more refined specialization.  Many have deplored this process as allegedly producing a kind of fragmentation that makes communication across specialties and hence their integration impossible.  Such a view seems in conflict with Durkheim's contention that increase in the division of labor is a particularly important source of solidarity.  This paper is basically a study in the nature of the balance between trends to increasing differentiation and complementary mechanisms of integration. 

 

                Relatively early in our study of the structure of the university, Platt and I noticed certain phenomena that seemed incompatible with the thesis of the rush to specialization.  The first of these is the inclusion in the ordinary college or university faculty (of arts and sciences) of the whole range of intellectual disciplines instead of their separation into, for example, schools of natural science, social science, and the humanities, to say nothing of still narrower specialization.  To be sure, such faculties are divided into departments, but faculties have not been abandoned as organizations.  A second failure to specialize consisted in the fact that undergraduate teaching, graduate teaching, and research are performed within the same faculties and departments and to a large extent by the same people.  Again, separate undergraduate colleges have survived; yet there are few purely graduate schools and few institutions devoted specially to research.  Finally, schools for applied professional training have for the most part become faculties of the same universities that have undergraduate colleges and academic graduate schools.  The reader will note that the fea-

tures of the professional complex emphasized in Chapter 2 with reference to certain problems of biomedical research are part of this "bundle" phenomenon. 

 

                ⁴ Neil J. Smelser, "Epilogue: Social-Structural Dimensions of Higher Education," in Parsons and Platt, American University, pp. 389-422.

                ⁵ Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1964; first published in French in 1893).

 

Introduction to Part II 95

 

                This paper was written for, and published in, the volume edited by Neil Smelser and Gabriel A. Almond, Public Higher Education in California, the main part of which contains Smelser's study of that system, alongside a number of other commentaries on these problems.  Smelser, as noted in the Preface to The American University, functioned as a kind of house critic to that project and wrote an epilogue that was published as a chapter of that book.  There is a sense in which Chapter 7 is, and it was so entitled, a corresponding kind of epilogue to the Smelser study.  An attempt to extend the pattern of "clustering" that characterizes the university bundle to analyzing the elite structure of American society is briefly developed in Chapter 9 of Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory, "Social Structure and the Media of Interchange." ⁶  This paper was written after Chapter 7 of the present volume. 

 

                The last selection in Part II is very brief.  Chapter 8, "Stability and Change in the American University," was written as part of a symposium to which there were some eighty-one contributors.  The symposium, published in Daedalus in 1974, was an attempt by the editors to assemble a wide variety of views, after the turmoil had largely subsided, on the consequences of the disturbances in the American university system, which culminated in the later 1960s, with 1970 as the last year of acute disturbance.  Written two years later than the last parts of The American University, this essay could take advantage of a better perspective on developmental trends than could earlier work.  In this contribution I came to the conclusion that although important changes had been and were taking place, the main structure we had outlined and analyzed in The American University had remained intact in most universities of the type we had treated.  I did not then, and do not now, see the portent of a truly radical swing to a quite different type of university from what had developed prior to the disturbances, as some have.  In a sense, Chapter 5 and Chapter 8 serve to bracket Part II's consideration of problems of higher education in modern society. 

 

⁶ Talcott Parsons, Social Systems and the Evolution  of Action Theory (New York: Free Press, 1977).