The American University: chapter 1

The American University – 1973

1 INTRODUCTION

This book is conceived not as a broad survey of the American academic system but as a specialized analysis of certain aspects of it. Such a conception necessitates concentrating attention on one sector of a diverse system. It is ultimately motivated by concern with trends of development in Western society and of the place of higher education in it.

What is thought of as modern society took shape in the seventeenth century in the northwest corner of the European system of societies, in Great Britain, Holland, and France. The subsequent development of modern society included three processes of revolutionary structural change: the Industrial Revolution, the Democratic Revolution, and the Educational Revolution. The three did not uniformly involve concomitant political violence.

These three revolutions have had features in common. Although they have all been fraught with tension, they have on balance advanced the level of the human condition as their impact has been diffused. To use a currently unfashionable term, they brought about "progressive" changes in an evolutionary sense. For both society and the individual, they contributed to freedoms from previously constricting limitations and to opportunities for previously impossible achievements. This occurred within a framework of institutionalized individualism. Institutionalized individualism means a mode of organization of the components of human action which, on balance, enhanced the capacity of the average individual and of collectivities to which he belongs to implement the values to which he and they are committed. This enhanced capacity at the individual level has developed concomitantly with that of social and cultural frameworks of organization and institutional norms, which form the framework of order for the realization of individual and collective unit goals and values. This institutional order is possible only if there is some consensus on the relevant values and the basic patterns of cultural orientation with which these are associated.

The Industrial Revolution. The industrial revolution alleviated the constrictions of human welfare traditionally associated with the conception of "want." Thus the recent salience of the problem of poverty is an indication of the new faith that mass poverty is no longer necessary. One meaning of economic progress is the increase of generalized material facilities available for a broad range of uses. There is concern currently with the costs involved in the comparative affluence that has been achieved: such costs as the acceptance of labor and other organizational discipline, the development of technologies which can be put to destructive uses, pollution of the environment which is difficult to reverse, and some aspects of what is vaguely called "alienation." Nevertheless, few seriously advocate return to the level of the relatively primitive agrarian economy which prevailed prior to the last two centuries. Among the consequences would have to be a drastic reduction of population and indeed of life expectancy.

The Democratic Revolution. The democratic revolution has reduced coercive control over human individuals and subcollectivities by other human agencies, notably by governments. It placed authority more fully under the control of those who must act under it, especially the authority of those in elective office. Limitations exist on the effectiveness of these new freedoms, but on balance greater freedom has been gained. Bear in mind, though, that these democratic developments depend on facilitating circumstances, such as a regime of institutionalized law. It is difficult to realize that developments which have restricted previously arbitrary power have also led to an increase of the power potential of systems of collective action.

For example, the freedom of economic enterprise means greater scope for organized entrepreneurship, including relatively modest firms. And the effectiveness with which democratic governments are capable of conducting destructive wars is evidence for their increased effectiveness in mobilizing larger resources, in maintaining a political order over large populations and territories, and in other spheres. For this reason, even totalitarian dictatorships have sought mass popular support, they have not been content to rely on the "divine right" of the dictators to rule. Perhaps it is not an accident that the Communist regimes call themselves Peoples' Democracies. Such considerations suggest that the average individual has greater political freedom than before (including freedom within nongovernmental associational contexts) and that concurrently capacity for effective collective action within modern societies has been enhanced. This means also enhanced collective freedom to implement values. Despite the instabilities and frustrations that the democratic revolution has entailed, few would advocate returning, if that were possible, to the political absolutism of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Europe or to feudal conditions.

The Educational Revolution. We must describe the educational revolution more fully. It has reduced ignorance and developed the capacity both of individuals and of societies to utilize knowledge in the interest of human goals and value-implementation At the cultural level, knowledge is parallel to economic resources at the level of societal organization. Knowledge enhances capacity for rational action. Despite current preoccupation with the costs of these advances, such as the alleged damage to the nonrational or expressive aspects of human concern, we shall contend that the net impact of the educational revolution is constructive. The modern university, especially in its American version, is the current culmination of the educational revolution. It has become the lead component of an extensive process of change permeating modern society at many levels. Because of this lead status of the university, we have elected to concentrate on it.

Education, in the sense of institutional formalization of learning processes, may be regarded in terms of quantitative extension in populations and of levels of qualitative attainment within its relevant spheres. On the quantitative side, universalization of formal education for the masses has been achieved, at least to the point of general literacy. Before the nineteenth century, this had hardly been advocated, much less attempted, for the population as a whole. It had existed for small groups such as the male citizens of the leading Greek polis, certain Diaspora Jewish groups, and certain religious sectarian groups, such as Protestants especially oriented to the Bible. The innovation was the policy of mass universal education for large societies This development, originating in Western Europe and North America, occurred in conjunction with the institutionalization of citizenship through the democratic revolution.

Once the process started, it spread to larger proportions of age cohorts. Moreover, upgrading of levels of educational attainment occurred so that increasing proportions of a cohort advanced to high levels of accomplishment, measured, for example, by years of formal schooling. In the United States, universal elementary education was largely realized by the turn of the twentieth century, and a marked increase in the proportions beginning secondary education was under way. This trend continued during the first third of the century. By the 1930's the universalization of secondary education, measured by completion of high school, was approximated. The next third of the century, especially the period immediately following the end of World War II, saw a swift upsurge in participation in the system of higher education. By the later 1960's, the proportion of the age cohort going on from high school graduation to some kind of higher education was more than 50 percent, a situation historically unprecedented.

Current discussion of the universalizing of higher education, the next logical step, leaves open the question of precise level to be sought. Most often advocated is the universalization of the four-year undergraduate college program. Minimal though this would seem from the point of view of graduate and professional levels, nothing like it has previously been dreamed of for mass populations. Note that the process of educational upgrading has not developed evenly for all population groups. Some groups surged ahead and others lagged behind. This has been especially characteristic of the United States with its local control of public school systems and its pattern of private and parochial schools. At the college level, the American system has been more diversified, with a large number of private colleges of many different types and quality, many originally founded under religious auspices. American public institutions have been rapidly growing, although not at the federal level. State universities and colleges began first, more recently municipal institutions developed and most recently community junior colleges. Higher education in the United States has never resembled the French system in which a central ministry administers for the entire country.

¹ Everett c. Hnghes, The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (chicago and New York, Aldine-Atherton, 1971), chaps. iv and V, pp.29-51.

The Development of the University System. At the beginning of the Civil War there was no such thing as an American university in the European sense there were only colleges, a large number of them. Shortly after the war, an innovative process began. This process centered in private institutions, first with development toward university status of existing private colleges like Columbia and Harvard and, a little later, Yale and Princeton. Then new private universities were established: The Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Clark, and later the University of Chicago and Stanford. A few state universities also emerged: Michigan, Wisconsin, and California at Berkeley. In this process, the undergraduate college was not superseded but incorporated. Indeed, among colleges that developed into universities, a correlation existed between level of success and continuity with their older traditions, as Columbia, Yale, and Harvard illustrated. One factor in the failure of The Johns Hopkins and Clark to maintain their early promise may have been their inability to upgrade their undergraduate colleges to the same degree as their graduate and professional schools.

The distinctive contribution of the American development compared with, say, German universities was graduate schools of arts and sciences and, within such schools and undergraduate colleges, the establishment of departments rather than "chairs." The undergraduate colleges have remained the channel through which the company of educated men and women necessarily passed in the acquisition of a general education and were complemented (for those being more highly trained) by graduate study in schools of arts and sciences and in professional schools. As graduate schools of arts and sciences grew more closely integrated into the university, both the relative quantity and the prestige of undergraduate professional training, for example, in engineering, declined. Concomitantly, professionalization of the research function developed rapidly, with contributions to the advancement of knowledge becoming an expectation for the higher prestige levels of academic faculties. The graduate schools supported this expectation because their functions came to be conceived not only as equipping their students with current knowledge but also with capacity for contributing to its advancement, including command of the procedures for making such contributions.

An intriguing analogy can be drawn between the educational and industrial revolutions: the distinct functions that developed within the system of higher education are somewhat comparable to distinct industries. At least four such industries (or functions) comprise the higher education complex.

One is the general education industry, which formed the base line from which the others have differentiated.

A second is the research industry, which is concerned with enhancing the cognitive capacity of society through adding to the cultural base on which it operates.

A third is graduate training of the personnel who will be the successors of current academicians.

A fourth industry is training in capacity to apply knowledge to areas where members of the society encounter practical problems, the handling of which can be improved by the use of expert competence grounded in systematic knowledge. The professions of medicine and law are the prototypes of this function they are taught in special schools for the training of practitioners in the applied professions.

Another function which has not become so formally institutionalized in organizational divisions of the university system is that of contributing to the general cultural definition of the situation as distinguished from more particularized knowledge either in one of the intellectual disciplines or in knowledge relevant to applied practical problems. Cultural definition has historically been performed by the theological faculties of universities, which were not only training schools for the clergy but also centers of intellectual probing into problems of religious orientation. In the more secularized university system of today, this function is more ideological than religious. Some continuity exists between philosophical concerns of members of the university who operate at high levels of generality in discussing the human condition and intellectuals outside the university who are more explicitly ideological. The respects in which academic competence can contribute to the definition of these orientation problems and the nature of the balances between these cognitive contributions and other relevant components remain problematical.

In all these respects, the university has spearheaded the educational revolution, perhaps in ways comparable to those in which highly efficient firms spearheaded the mature phases of the industrial revolution. One feature of the process has been differentiation of the primary function from others (academic functions from generalized social-status complexes) as well as differentiation within the new sector in levels of attainment under the relevant subvalues. Thus the new university is no longer identified with a diffuse upper class, as were the elite institutions in this country, or Oxford and Cambridge in England, or the grandes Acoles in France.

The Rise of the Professions. What has emerged in place of quasi-aristocratic elitism is professionalism. Intellectual command of the requisite cultural components through training rather than status independent of exposure to such training has become the criterion of membership in academic communities. Not considerations of ascribed status but individual achievement in meeting standards of

universalistically defined qualification have guided selection. Competence in some intellectual subject matter has become the ticket of admission to faculty membership and to the opportunity for research. Furthermore, for those who do not aspire to professional status in these senses, the criteria of successful study of cognitive culture are couched in terms of the same set of standards.² Professionalism is currently a subject of controversy. One view holds that it is an evil which must be extirpated if the academic system is to regain its health. We will discuss this problem at some length. For the present we wish only to point out the trend of professional development in the universities, our special concern.

Professionalism, which has advanced farthest in the lead sector of the academic system, the universities, is central to the general educational analysis of the present volume. In carrying out this analysis, we must pay attention to the internal complexity of American universities. We must bear in mind their interdependence with the rest of the academic system. Finally, we must relate the academic system to the nonacademic sectors of the society as a whole as well as particular parts of it: the political system, the economy, and aspects of the class system and of the societal community.³

² Parallel statements can be made for other contexts. In the industrial field, despite the specific role still played by property rights in private enterprise or by political considerations in socialized enterprises, managerial competence plays a paramount role in the conduct of productive organizations. In the case of political organization, the situation is less clear, although it is common to speak of skill as a politician independent of prestigeful status in other respects.

³ We were aware of these facts about the special importance of universities in the educational revolution before the wave of campus crises emphasized the existence of basic problems in the academic system. The Berkeley disturbance of 1964 was considered an isolated campus aberration until the crescendo of confrontations in 1967- 1969, especially the crisis at Columbia. Nonetheless, we did not anticipate such serious disturbances as in fact occurred. Such obliviousness might be interpreted as incapacity to undertake the present study, although we were certainly not alone in underestimating the disruptive potentialities of the underlying forces. Events of the past six or seven years have forced us to reassess these forces: the institutional structure of the academic system, as well as sources of conflict and instability, both internal to universities and in relation to other sectors of the society. The problem of stability-instability will be more fully discussed in Chapter 7, but this perspective permeates the study as a whole.

It is hoped that this is a better book than it would have been had it gone to press in 1964, partly because it has sought to understand the crises of the academic system, partly because an analysis of structural base lines and of the pattern of development relatively independent of the crises may prove to be advantages. A study focused on dramatic events without a solid background orientation acquired independently of the impact of those events is likely to suffer from the myopia dictated by preoccupation with the events themselves.

Action Systems: Cultural Systems, Social Systems, Personalities, and Behavioral Organisms

The study will attempt to be accurate with respect to relevant matters of fact, but it will also select facts by the use of a complicated theoretical scheme. The present section will present an outline of the scheme. One task is to analyze relations among the subsystems of the cultural tradition of central concern here, the cognitive complex, and the fiduciary subsystem of the society.⁴ In addition, it will be necessary to deal with the individual personality, especially in considering socialization. We shall treat both of these issues in the framework of the general theory of action. "Action" (in our conception) means human behavior insofar as it is symbolically oriented. Symbolic systems are organized in terms of codes similar to linguistic codes in that they constitute sets of norms regulating processes of communication. Action within the code can be diverse in the same sense that using a particular language does not commit a speaker to saying specific things, but enables him to adapt the content of his communications through linguistic utterance to a variety of exigencies and intentions. The concept of action assumes a linguistic level of symbolization, of codification of meanings. It assumes also that attempts to analyze the ordering of behavior must take into account the nature of systems of action and their component parts, the nature of their environments and their component parts, and the relation of systems and environments to each other.

Action is a kind of behavior, and behavior necessarily implies the existence of a living organism as the behaving entity. It follows therefore that action systems contain a plurality of living human organisms. When, however, behavior is oriented and given meaning in symbolic terms, there exists also a cultural system. Culture consists in codified systems of meaningful symbols and those aspects of action directly oriented to problems of the meaningfulness of such symbols. Thus, culture includes belief systems, sets of propositions of cognitive significance as well as expressive symbols, and the codes giving them meaning.

⁴ The fiduciary subsystem of a society acts as a trustee of some interests ill the society. E.g., conservation groups belong to the fiduciary subsystem insofar as they protect the societal interest in the natural environment. We shall he dealing in this volume with that portion of the fiduciary suhsystem concerned with trusteeship of the cognitive cultural tradition.

Analysis of behavior which has attained the action level must have a dual reference: to the living organism behaving in its environments and to cultural meaning-systems. The articulation of these two ultimate reference points with each other necessitates the identification of two further action systems: social systems and personalities. Cultural systems are organized about meaning-complexes abstractable from particular acting units, individual or collective. Thus classical Greek culture persists many centuries after classical Greek society has ceased to exist. A cultural system of any considerable complexity is typically attached to several interactive systems, say, two or more societies. A social system \always involves a plurality of concrete living human beings interacting with each other. Aspects of their interaction may, however, be analyzed for particular purposes without dealing with the constituent human organisms in their full concreteness. A social system is thus a special category of action system analytically distinguishable from the cultural systems of which it is the bearer and which order the interaction processes which occur in it.

A distinction should also be made between the individual personality and the social system, though we must guard against the ancient fallacy that every social system is composed of concrete individuals. In any particular interaction system only a part of the participating personality comes to be engaged. The concept of membership makes the proper distinction. As member of a given family, one is involved in certain interactions with other family members, but the same person may be a member of a number of other interaction systems, for example, the organization in which he is employed, that have little to do with his family roles. Another distinction is that between the aspect of the total living organism engaged in nonsymbolic behavior like breathing and the psychological aspect of the individual organism, the personality. This distinction hinges on the organic side on hereditary aspects of the organism, its anatomical structures, and patterns of physiological process, and on the psychological side on those aspects of the concrete living individual which relate to the processes of learning and the content of what he has learned. At the human level, crucial learning occurs in the social and cultural spheres, namely, at symbolic levels. What Freud called the "reality principle" referred to orientation to the context of "object relations," that is, to social interaction with other human beings. Similarly, command of language is necessary for truly human behavior. Though the capacity for linguistic performance is organically inherited, there is no evidence that the specific language learned is a function of the genes.

Four Subsystems of Action. The distinctions among the four subsystems of action (behavioral organism, personality, social system, and cultural system) are not arbitrary. They constitute application of a general four-function paradigm for the analysis of living systems. This paradigm is so central to the analysis of the whole book and will be used so constantly that a somewhat fuller explanation at the present juncture should save the reader trouble later on. We will start with the two axes of the paradigm and then discuss the four categories of function which are derived from their cross-classification.

The Two Axes

The first axis, by diagramming convention displayed as vertical, is called internal-external.

This concerns the relation of a system of action to its environment (s). It is assumed that the system of reference is characterized by a pattern of functioning by virtue of which its internal states are at any given time different from those of the environment in significant respects. The direction of these differences is toward greater stability and a higher level of organization than that of the environment in the respects relevant to the system of reference. A larger component of randomness exists in the environing systems than internally in the system of reference: In short, the environment displays a greater degree of positive entropy, the system of negative entropy.

Systems of action, like other living systems, are open systems engaged in continual interchange of inputs and outputs with their environments. The categories of input required by the systems are not unitary but various. Moreover, the various categories of potential input available to an action system vary independently of each other. Thus for a social system both motivational inputs from individuals and cultural standards are essential, but the psychological states of individuals and the norms of a culture are not directly connected social disorganization by alienation and by anomie need to be distinguished. Pari passu, the same can be said of the outputs of a system they are various, not inherently bound together and have differential impacts on the environment.

Some matching exists between the differentiation of the system's relations to inputs from and outputs to the environment and its own internal structure. Thus what we will call "telic” systems with socialization functions and legal systems concerned with normative order are differentiated from each other in the more complex societies. Differentiation of input-output relations to the environment (s) and the related differentiation in the internal structure and processes of the system of reference itself create special problems for the system itself, if it is assumed that a pattern is maintained which is different from the environmental state of affairs. One problem concerns the maintenance of boundaries between system and environment and pari passu between subsystems within the system. If internal and external states are different, there cannot be continuous variation from some defined center of the system to zones which are nonsystem, but there must be points at which transitions are marked and interchange is selective rather than nearly random. This does not preclude boundary-zones rather than lines, but it does preclude the conception of continuity of transition over the whole range.

The second axis, which relates to process in time, we have labeled instrumental-consummatory. This is a somewhat narrow designation but in the right direction. A pattern does not in the real world actualize itself. The system for which it is a template must meet conditions and utilize environmentally available resources. Meeting conditions and utilization are possible only through processes which are inherently time-extended. Time is one aspect of processes which include energy input and utilization, organization or combination of components, and evaluation of stages. These processes are combinations of the logic of cybernetic theory with its conception of the implementation of a program and of economic theory with its logic of combination of factors evaluated by value-added criteria.

One functional problem involved here concerns the balances between input of resources, their processing to the point of being utilizable, and their actual consumption. These categories designate stages in a sequence of temporal succession. Resources cannot be processed before they are available through input to the system, and they cannot later be consumed until the process of production through combination has made them useful, that is, in the economic case endowed them with utility. Presumably, consumption - the economic term is used here to designate all consummatory end-states - is the most highly valued of the states of affairs along the above sequence. But it is ineluctable that the level of consumables is a function of nonconsumption at earlier stages of resources which might be devoted to later stages. In the time perspective, the level of future consumption must be a function of abstention from possible current consumption-the idea of delayed gratification.

A second problem internal to the system is integration. If its interchange relations with its environment are differentiated and these differentiations involve differentiated structures and processes within the system, continued functioning requires meshing of these differentiated components so that, from the perspective of implementation of the system-pattern, they minimally interfere with each other and perhaps reinforce each other.

This is the basis for dichotomizing the variable defined by this axis as instrumental-consummatory. It is a distinction between processes which build up resources for future utilization and those which actually put them to use, thereby destroying them through consumption. This distinction can be conceived as defining the nature of system-processes over time rather than simply a point on a continuum. Cross-classification of the two axes, conceived as defining dichotomous variables then yields the four categories of function as shown in Figure 1.1.


			Instrumental	Consummatory

Internal		L	Latent pattern-maintenance	Integration	I




External			Adaption	Goal-attainment

		A			G

	Visualize bi-directional links between all cells, including diagonally.

Figure 1.1 - The Four-Function Paradigm

The Four Functions

Latent Pattern-Maintenance. On both primary axes the pattern-maintenance function attempts to formulate the basis of the distinctiveness of the system of reference. It is the pattern which defines the distinctive nature of the system as contrasted with its environments. In the other axis it is the focus of the maintenance of continuity - including that of developmental pattern-over time. Thus our conception of a distinctive action system has much in common with that of Ernst Mayr⁵ of an organic species. If that analogy holds up, the pattern~maintenance function should be thought of as equivalent to that of maintaining the integrity of the species' gene pool.

Conceptualization in this area has undergone development influenced by concepts from linguistics and from the area of cybernetic control and information theory, such as codes, templates, and programs. The newer concepts of genetics and of linguistics seem in some respects to converge.

The concept pattern is a conveniently imprecise term to designate a defining and controlling component of an action system, which is latent with respect to the operative functions of the system, especially those involving the action-equivalents of energy in the physical sense. This means it should be conceived to be at the same time controlling and insulated. Its features antedate the specific system-operations of interest and will survive them. In action terms, this is the culture concept: culture in certain senses transcends particular social and psychological systems. There is an analogy to the gene pool of a species which transcends any phenotypic individual or aggregate of them.

Adaptation. The function of adaptation, taken from biological theory, concerns the interface between system and environment with special reference to the longer-run interests of the system, not only in maintenance but in potentials of development from an evolutionary perspective. It involves not only the pattern, but the system's capacities for realistic functioning which at the same time maintains the integrity of the pattern and meets the environmental exigencies of its actualization. A dimension of adaptation is the generalization of adaptive capacity. By this we mean the development of modes of adaptation not specific to particular environmental exigencies but useful in coping with increasingly wide ranges of exigencies. Thus in action terms cognitive capacity is highly generalized in its adaptive significance. Knowing how to cope with mosquitoes as an annoyance to human beings but not with any other species of insects is a low level of adaptive capacity. Adaptation not only is passive adjustment to environmental conditions so as to avoid extinction but includes various modes of capacity to cope with environmental conditions and to utilize environmentally available resources in the interest of system functioning.

⁵ Errnst Mayr, Populations, Species, and Evolution (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1970), chap. i.

Goal-Attainment. The goal-attainment function refers to the needs of action systems to establish relatively specific system-environment relationships and the structures and processes which facilitate capacities of the system to do this. Thus, for a mobile animal, food-search is a function which is effectively performed if the animal, when hungry, can usually establish contact with appropriate food-sources and gain control of the food-objects. Goal-attainment is to be distinguished by its specificity from adaptation. This concerns specificity with respect to the relevance of the pattern of matching between system-need and environmental object and also temporally with respect to the specificity of occasions to activate goal-oriented behavior of specific types, as distinguished from the longer-run and more generalized adaptation to a total environment.

In proportion as a living system develops capacities to cope with a differentiated and varying environment, it must generalize capacities to do so rather than merely reacting to the ad hoc stimuli of the environment as these impinge on the system. This is the basis of the differentiation between goal-attainment and adaptation as functional categories.

Integration. Integration is the internal counterpart of adaptation to the environment. For reasons suggested above, a system comes to be internally differentiated and to be exposed to differentiated relations to its environment involving both inputs and outputs. These (as well as internal processes) activate internal units differentially in type of functioning and in time. Direct impact of these variable processes on the core of a system without any mediating mechanisms, which help mitigate potential conflicts and facilitate mutual reinforcement, would be disorganizing as seen from the point of view of pattern-maintenance and implementation. Here the factor of generalization is important, matching its importance for adaptive function. The functional needs of the system can, by integrative organization, be generalized so that they can be dealt with on a basis transcending their ad hoc impingement in particular circumstances. The conception of a relatively stable internal environment as developed for physiology by the French physiologist Claude Bernard and his Harvard successor, Walter B. Cannon, and for sociology by Emile Durkheim the French sociologist, whose name will recur frequently in this book, is an aspect of the organization of systems with respect to integrative functions.


L	Cultural system	Social system	I



	Behavioral organism	Personality system

A			G

figure 1.2 - Structure of the General Action System

The first use to which we put the general functional paradigm is its application to the general system of action as such which we conceive, as diagrammed in Figure 1.2, to be differentiated into four primary subsystems along functional lines. These, as designated, we shall call the cultural system (L), the social system (I), the personality system (G), and the behavioral organism (A), respectively. These subsystems, it should be clearly understood, are not conceived as classes of concrete entities but as analytically defined abstract entities, all abstracted from the mass of known and knowable "data" about human action and behavior. This paradigm is of especially crucial importance for the present study because, as we shall have occasion to emphasize many times, its design necessitates dealing with two or more of these subsystems as explicitly distinguished from each other but at the same time specifically interdependent with each other. This cannot in a simple sense be a "sociological" study of the university, nor can it be a "cultural" study, it must be both in a very specific way and also a psychological and an organic study. The paradigm presented in Figure 1.2 we consider an indispensable aid to orderly thinking in this inherently complex field.⁶

Cultural Systems: Analogues of Genes. Just as the genes in the higher species transcend the life cycle of a particular organism and are transmitted from generation to generation, changing more slowly and by different processes than does the individual organism, so do culture traits transcend the viability of their host society. A cultural system can die out through the extinction of the personalities and societies which are its bearers, but it can also survive its bearers. Culture is not only transmitted from generation to generation through teaching and learning, it can be embodied in externalized symbols, for example, works of art, the printed page, or storage devices such as computer tapes. Though there are differences between hearing Plato philosophize in the Academy at Athens and reading The Republic, especially in a language other than classical Greek, there is a sense in which the meaning of the cultural object is the same. Hence persons living in the twentieth century can share with Plato's contemporaries parts of the culture of Athens in the fourth century B.C. This is temporal continuity that no person can approach. Thus, a cultural system can be stable over time and relatively insulated from the effect of its environments, which include not only the physico-organic world but social, psychological, and organic subsystems of action. This stability enables a cultural system to serve as the prototype of an autonomous action system.

The core of a cultural system is its "code" component, which is more stable than are the concrete symbolic uses of the code in the course of communication.⁷ Knowing a language in the code sense does not commit the one who knows it to communicating a particular idea on a particular occasion. Speech is an action process the content of which is a function of social and psychological developments and of changes in the state of the organism, of the physical environment, or of other aspects of culture than the linguistic code itself.

⁶ In what follows in this introductory chapter, however, we shall not attempt to present a general review of the theoretical scheme as a whole, but will confine our attention to selected aspects which will he of specific importance for purposes of the present study. For the reader who has more general theoretical interests, however, we are including a technical appendix at the end of the book which will present a more comprehensive set of formal paradigms and a brief explication of them.

⁷ The word "code" is not used here in a specifically technical sense, e.g., as in the expression the "genetic code," but roughly in the sense in which Jacobson and Halle, for language, distinguish "code" from "message." See Roman Jacobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, Mouton, 1956).

Our main interest is with the cognitive subdivision of the culture of modern society. The cultural objects which comprise a cognitive system, abstracted from particular noncognitive action context, we will call knowledge. One test is the capacity of embodiment of such cultural objects in nonhuman symbolic form, for instance, the printed page. Knowledge is only one of the four categories in which we classify cultural objects. The other three are constitutive symbolization, moral-evaluative symbolization, and expressive symbolization. We will not at this point define them. However, we must point out that moral-evaluative symbolization has a special relation to the values institutionalized in social systems and will have therefore special significance for the subsequent discussion.

The Difference between Cultural Objects and a Cultural System. A body of knowledge, though a cultural object, is more specifically a complex of meanings symbolized within a code. A cultural system as a system of action, however, consists not only of cultural objects but, as a system, of all the components of action insofar as they are oriented in terms of cultural objects. Thus, the cognitive subsystem of action consists of action-components oriented to cognitive objects, those currently available in the situation

of action and those potentially created by such action, for example, through research. It also includes actions oriented to the understanding of cognitive objects, that is, of knowledge, and to the dissemination of such understanding through teaching.


L	Constitutive symbolization	Moral-eveluative symbolization	I



	Cognitive symbolization	Expressive symbolization

A			G

figure 1.3 - Structure of the Cultural System

This conception of an action system with cultural primacy is an abstraction. The concrete actions are those of organism-personality units which typically engage in social relations with one another. We are interested in distinguishing between the cultural action systems of the American academic milieu and the social systems in which these cultural systems are embedded. A social system is also an abstraction. It is concerned with symbolic behavior organized about the processes of social interaction among acting

units, that is, with actions mutually oriented to other actors in a system of interaction. Although individuals are ultimately the participating members of social systems, collectivities can be the acting units of more inclusive social systems, for example, a society. Just as every concrete social system must involve the action of individuals - though not as total personalities - so every interactive system has a culture, though this does not mean that it is a cultural system. If it were scientifically legitimate to assume such an identity, the task of this book would be simple which, as the reader will discover in due course, it is not.

The Fiduciary Subsystem. Beyond this distinction between social and cultural systems, we wish to point out that an academic social system is a type of social system having a special relation to culture, special in that its primary societal function is to act as a trustee of cognitive culture and the interests associated with it. It is part of the fiduciary subsystem of a society, that subsystem involving closer articulation with cultural references than the three other subsystems.

The other three subsystems of a society are,

first, the economy, conceived as social organization in the interest of the production and allocation of generally disposable resources, especially in relation to the physical environment,

second, the polity, concerned with the organization of social units for the society as a whole or its subsystems in the interest of collective goal-attainment,

third, the societal community which has integrative functions on behalf of the society as a whole.

It is also necessary for our purposes to subclassify the fiduciary subsystem of a society. The fiduciary system lies in the zone of interpenetration between cultural system and society. It includes action structures and processes where cultural meaning systems articulate with special function in the societal system. These special functions are the foci of institutionalization of relevant cultural patterns in the society. Hence there must be at least rough matching between the meaning-patterns at the cultural level and the social-functional references at the societal level.


L	Fiduciary system	Societal community	I



	Economy	Polity

A			G

figure 1.4 - Structure of the Social System


L	Constitutive system (civil religion)	Moral community	I



	Rationality system (cognitive functions)	Telic system

A			G

figure 1.5 -the Fiduciary System

The Cognitive Subsystem. A fiduciary subsystem with adaptive function at both cultural and societal levels we call the cognitive or rationality subsystem and consider that it is governed by theoretical codes. Its primary societal function is the rationalization of action. (Rationality may be used to designate a type of action, but it is also a component of action when the latter is not predominantly rational.) Thus, the adaptive subsystem of the fiduciary system is concerned with the maintenance of standards

of rationality. Obviously, the rationality system is concerned with education and indeed with learning in general.

The Moral Community. A second subsystem of the fiduciary system involves on the cultural side moral-evaluative symbolization and on the societal side the function of ordering societal relationships by contributing to a sense of community. Both moral-evaluative symbolization and the societal community have integrative functions for their respective cultural and social subsystems of action, and their interpenetration has integrative significance for action generally. The moral-evaluative function integrates normative components of culture with the possibility of a normative definition of meaningful orientation of actors toward

their ultimate concerns as well as toward the practical exigencies of their lives. The concept of moral community refers to collective organizations of acting units which can embody meaningful common orientations and at the same time command the loyalty of participants at the level of practical action. This combination reflects the institutionalization of systems of values common to the members of societal groupings.

These two subsystems are the most relevant subsystems of the fiduciary system for the university, since the latter is concerned with cognitive culture and its integrative significance for society and its individual members. At the same time the university must have a community structure differentiated into subcommunities and articulated with many other communities outside itself, both in the academic world and in the nonacademic sectors of the society, and this differentiated community structure has relationships to the third and fourth subsystem of the fiduciary system.

The Telic Subsystem. The third subsystem of the fiduciary system, the telic subsystem, involves on the cultural side an expressive mode of symbolization. Whereas value-patterns are conceptions or "patterns” of the desirable, that is, they have normative significance for social action, the expressive sphere involves desires of individual personalities and organisms and also of collectivities. These desires are directed toward objects of and in the cultural, the social, the psychological and organic, the nonhuman,

and the physical worlds and to the relations of acting humans to them. Like all symbolization, the expressive category involves negative as well as positive meanings, that is, what is feared as well as what is desired.

The fiduciary subsystem of society we conceived, as noted, as the primary zone of interpenetration between the social and the cultural systems with institutionalized values as the primary cultural component involved. Within the fiduciary system, however, the subsystem we are calling telic is the one which places the strongest emphasis on further integration with the personality of the individual. This further integration focuses on the function of goal-attainment which we conceive to be the primary function of the personality at the general action level. At that of the social system which is our present primary concern, however, goal-attainment is conceived to be in the first instance a collective process.

It is our view that values constitute the primary legitimizing framework for bringing about this synthesis because, first, they define what is conceived to be desirable, not only at the general level of action but within the context of social interaction and as a basis for the individual participant to discriminate between what he desires and what on a more general level can be considered to be

desirable.

We must, however, be concerned not only with the way in which cultural values are institutionalized in the social system but also with the theoretical specifics of the articulation of the social system with the personality. To deal with this we have adopted the Freudian concept of cathexis as the "emotionally" under-pinned commitment of an individual to a context of what Freud in his later work called "object relations."⁵ We conceive cathexis in this sense to be the basis of individuals' capacity to participate in institutionalized collective goal-oriented processes, such as the "enterprise" of higher education.

This "performance” of the individual in committing himself to meaningful but also costly "choices" can be said to be broadly "rewarded" by societal contributions to his own "affective economy," on the assumption, which we will develop and analyze in Chapter 2, that affect is the generalized medium anchored in the social system at the level of general action. The theoretical problem will be introduced in the latter part of Chapter 2, but its empirical relevance to the present study will be developed at some length in the analysis of under-graduate student socialization in Chapter 4.

The primordial focus of telic function in societies has been kinship systems, which provide a connection with the motivation of individuals. Thus, sociologists commonly think that a primary function of kinship, especially of the modern nuclear family, is to order the motivations of individuals in relation to their social roles. For adults this means especially the management of emotional tensions that might otherwise jeopardize role performance. For children, in addition to this, there is the central function of socialization in the social-psychological sense of learning the roles that are being taught to them. Kinship is also the sector of a broader telic system closer to the motivational balances of individuals at unconscious levels. This broader telic system involves extensive collective references culminating in political commitments of the societal community as a whole. We will also class solidary groups of peers at adolescent and studentry levels as belonging primarily to the telic subsystem.

⁸ Cf. Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality (New York, The Free Press, 1964), chap. iv.

The Constitutive Subsystem. The symbolic forms, which presumptively embody a nonempirical boundary reference so far as they become integral to the action system through cultural definition, are its constitutive symbolism - symbolism which is not referential relative to a specifiable empirical reality, but is essential to the understanding of the action system of reference as meaningfully coherent. Within the fiduciary subsystem of the society, this is collective organization with predominantly religious reference, such as a church or, at a different level, a "civil" religious complex.

The Environments of Action Systems. One consequence of an evolutionary point of view needs to be made explicit. The concept of "environment" must be regarded as relative. With the development of organic life, the environment is modified - pollution is one possibility - and new environments are created. In a population of unicellular organisms, the environment of any individual organism may consist of a nonorganic environment and the other unicellular organisms with which the organism of reference comes

into contact. (With the emergence of multicellular organisms, a particular cell has an environment internal to the organism of which it is a part. A major theoretical advance in physiology was the introduction of the concept of the internal environment by Claude Bernard.) An organism then is increasingly exposed to an environment constituted by other members of its own species and, beyond this, by its membership in ecosystems consisting of many species interdependent with each other.

The development of new environments occurs also on the level of action systems. For Freud, the salient environment of the individual personality was the reality constituted by other persons interacting with the individual. Freud called this the field of "object relations." Durkheim extended this concept, independently of Freud, through his concept of the milieu social. Durkheim considered the social system in which the individual participated to be the crucial environment to which the action of a socialized individual had to adapt. In short, the individual human being has had to adapt to physical environments, organic environments, including his own organism viewed from the perspective of the self, his personality system as object rather than motivator, the personality systems of significant others, his social environment, his cultural environment, and finally his constitutive environment. Although these are a lot of environments, there is no

way to reduce their number without oversimplifying a complex world. The physical environment is only a small part of the total environment of a human being.

Integration. A further aspect of our theoretical scheme ought to be discussed in this introduction: the place of integration in the evolution of living systems. If differentiated subsystems are to cohere in an overall system which maintains its adaptive capacity, there must be integrating mechanisms. The articulation of the bones of a skeleton through joints and ligaments constitutes one mode of integration, but on advanced evolutionary levels there emerge mechanisms which operate through communication of in-

formation. Such mechanisms at organic levels are enzymes, hormones, and neural processes. Biologists agree that the central nervous system, especially the mammalian brain, is primarily an information-processing system, not a source of energy like the alimentary system nor an energy-utilization system like the musculature. Its functions concern control of these other processes, not substantive contribution to them.

At the level of action, mechanisms have developed comparable to organic information processing. We refer to such mechanisms as "symbolic media of interchange." The one that is best understood (and therefore can serve as a model for understanding the genus) is money. Money, like all symbolic media, is a kind of language. A symbolic medium operates in terms of a cultural code, in the case of money that of rights of possession ("property"). Money transcends existing rights in concrete objects of utility by creating a basis for negotiating new rights when needed and desired - subject to mutual consent. The essence of money in its pure form is that it is symbolic. Dollars may be symbolized by coins, by paper-money bills, by checks, or by entries on account books, they have no reality except as a category of meaning of a caltural object. In short, money has, in the economist's term, no "value in use" but only "value in exchange." This does not mean it Is not useful, but that its use consists of controlling access to objects of "intrinsic" usefulness: goods, services, and various forms of monetary assets. Money also functions as a measure of economic value, or utility, and, because its expenditure is optional in direction and in time, as a storehouse of value. For a unit in a system of social interaction to have money in specifiable amounts is to have been the recipient of special communications in the past and to be the potential agent of outward communications called "spending." To spend money is only to communicate a message to specified others.

Money is anchored in the economy, a functionally differentiated subsystem of a society, and is involved not only in mediating relations internal to it among economic actors but in mediating relations between the economy and the other subsystems of the society: the polity, the fiduciary system, and the societal community. Money should not be treated as a unique phenomenon but as one member of a family of media of interchange (political power, influence, and value-commitments) which, like money, are purely symbolic. Though the concept of power common in the social science literature has stressed distributive aspects rather than the interchange aspects stressed here, the societal impact of both money and power is generally recognized as is the impact of influence and value-commitments, albeit vaguely. Money and power are certainly involved in university affairs, but influence and value-commitments are, though less recognized, at least as important, if not more so in linking the academic world to the larger society.

Symbolic Media of Action. In the course of substantive analysis of the American academic system we shall have to deal not only with the four symbolic media at the level of the social system, but also with corresponding media at the level of the general system of action, internally to each subsystem and externally linkmg each with the other three. Thus intelligence is such a medium anchored in the behavioral organism performance-capacity is a medium anchored in the personality system affect is a medium anchored in the social system, and definition of the situation is a medium anchored in the cultural system. Each of these media will be discussed at the point where its understanding becomes necessary to the analysis.

Two additional characteristics of the generalized media should be kept in mind. One effect of developing a symbolic medium is to introduce new degrees of freedom in the action-potentials of individual or collective units in the system and consequently greater flexibility in its functioning. For example, the development of monetary market exchange provided greater flexibility than barter. If money is acceptable in the relevant market system, the holder and receiver are free to choose the items on which to spend instead of being dependent on what specific barter-partners have and are willing to part with. They can shop around among competing sources of supply for the same items, being freer to bargain over terms and not bound by time constraints imposed by the perishability, storage costs, or other inconveniences of holding concrete objects of possession.

A second characteristic of generalized media is that at a sufficient level of development, they possess mechanisms by which their volume can be expanded. Thus, the money supply can be expanded by the operation of credit creation carried out by banks and other financial institutions. This possibility is an extension of the increasing degrees of freedom which develop beyond the level of barter as markets widen, for example, from finished-product exchange to marketability of the factors of production and various forms of financial assets. The analogue of credit creation is found for the other symbolic media when they and the systems in which they operate have become sufficiently differentiated and integrated. We will eventually analyze "intelligence banking" in relation to the system of cognitive culture and its societal frameworks.

The evolutionary process of increasing degrees of freedom with a widening range of alternatives open to unit-action introduces not only flexibility but also potentiality of instability into action systems. In any exchange system, there are various potentialities for instability at a variety of locations in the system. The presence of symbolic media funnels tensions generated at particular points in the system into the functioning of the medium itself, notably into confidence or lack of confidence in its stability, an attitude on which its general acceptability is dependent. Where there is substantial freedom for credit creation, this potential of instability centering in the medium is accentuated. Cumulative escalations of self-accentuating motion occur, either toward excessive commitments expressed in terms of the medinm or toward devaluation of such commitments and an increasing tendency to avoid them.

Economic fluctuations centering on the monetary system provide a ready illustration of these cumulative processes. The economic term for cumulative excess in monetary commitments is inflation and that for cumulative decreases is deflation. We shall adopt these terms for more general use inflation or deflation will refer not only to monetary phenomena but to parallel processes involving any of the four symbolic media on the social system level or the four on the general action level. We shall ultimately (in Chapter 7) attempt to analyze some of the interrelations of inflationary and deflationary processes between two or more of the eight media which occur either simultaneously or in non-random succession.

These analytical problems are intricate and will not permit much more than hypothesis statement and crude empirical generalizations. Since theoretical analysis of academic systems has rarely been attempted in the action frame of reference, what little we will be able to accomplish should be better than not attempting it at all.

The chapter following this theoretical introduction (Chapter 2) will attempt to elucidate the components of the cognitive complex in human action systems, their relations to each other and to non-cognitive aspects of action generally and of the social system in particular. We shall deal with the concepts of cognition and learning, with knowledge as a system of cultural objects with cognitive primacy, and with competence as a cognitively grounded capacity of actors, individual and collective. We shall emphasize that sector of the institutionalized value pattern at the societal level encompassing cognitive rationality, since this value connects the cultural components of the cognitive complex with social organization, including the university. We shall, finally, pay attention to rationality as a component of action involving the relevance of cognitive standards of evaluation of its effectiveness.

The core value of the university is cognitive rationality. We shall devote Chapter 3 to its analysis and to its embodiment in the recently developed modern university. The institutional focus of this core value lies in the organization of research and of graduate training. We shall use this analysis of the cognitive complex to define points of articulation with subsystems of the society in which the values of cognitive rationality do not have primacy but must give way to some extent to other categories of societally relevant evaluation.

In Chapter 4 we shall turn to a context in which the primacy of cognitive rationality must be shared with another set of values, namely, those involved in the socialization of educated citizens as distinguished from the training of future academic professionals. This function is carried out mainly through the general education aspects of undergraduate colleges. We are particularly interested in the more demanding programs of general education in the colleges of highest academic quality, many of them integral parts of universities with graduate schools and large research programs.

Chapter 5 will deal with a second context in which the cognitive complex is combined with other complexes of interests and values in the society that are not primarily cognitive. The first of these is the applied professions, such as medicine and law and, in another grouping, education and social work. Such schools of professional training have commonly become integral parts of the university structure. The practical goals such as maintenance of health or effective organization of the educational process must share prominence in the evaluative context with the standards of cognitive rationality of action in the pursuit of these goals.

Chapter 6 will concern the relevance of cognitive standards to the formulation of definitions of the situation for the individual, the society, and the culture as these are discussed by intellectuals within and outside the academic system. Broadly speaking, they are interested in ideology, thought of in a nonpejorative sense. Cognitive standards are relevant to ideological pursuits, but the problems of ideological orientation transcend the cognitive complex in directions of value-commitment, of expressive symbolism, and indeed of religion.

Chapter 7 will deal with certain dynamic processes in the university system and in the relations of the university to its social environment. This chapter will be concerned with the nature of the crisis which the system has encountered in recent years. We shall deal with its background in secular trends of change, in pathological processes associated with rapid growth, and in shifts of balance which have produced structural strains, for example, rapid growth of the research complex and of graduate training. The crisis itself we shall interpret as centering in the undergraduate sector of the institutions of high academic quality, connected with changes in the general social environment, including the war in Vietnam and economic recession with its cutbacks of financial support for academic functions. These circumstances have produced a state analogous to an economic depression, hence we must deal in Chapter 8 with the problem of the prospects for recovery.

Shorter-run processes have been proceeding in a context of possibilities of larger structural change. The remainder of Chapter 8 will be devoted to an analysis of these trends in order to arrive at some tentative prognosis of the main developments in prospect beyond mere recovery from the recent crisis.

Chapter 9 will consist of commentary on the first eight chapters written by Neil J. Smelser. Smelser has consulted extensively with the authors throughout the project. In particular he has given us detailed commentaries on the first draft of the manuscript, chapter by chapter. Many of the points he has made have been taken into account in revision. Nevertheless, it seemed desirable for him to undertake an independent statement of his views.

Finally, the book will end with a technical appendix, which, for the reader interested in the analytical scheme, will attempt a diagrammatic presentation of the elements used in the discursive analysis contained in the book.

To conclude this introduction with a few words about the nature of our enterprise: As sociologists, we consider it at the same time a study of the American university as an object of observation and a study in the sociology of knowledge in the sense that we, in our differing roles, have been active participants in the system we are trying to describe as objectively as possible. This illustrates a methodological dilemma of the social sciences in that, in a sense different from that of the natural sciences, investigators are necessarily part of the phenomena they investigate, if not of the specific case, then of the category of cases. Chapter 2, as part of its discussion of cognitive rationality, will analyze the problem of the objectivity of knowledge in all the intellectual disciplines, including our own social sciences. This concern has a double significance for us and for other students of this sector of modern action systems and societies. On the one hand, objectivity of cognition as a sociocultural phenomenon is a theoretical assumption of our study, namely, that some men in some settings do in fact act in approximate conformity to the standards of cognitive rationality. On the other hand, we, as participants in the academic community, sharing its dominant values, ask readers to believe that our own behavior accords with those values. This comes perilously close to setting ourselves up as judges in our own case.

The resolution of the difficulty may lie in the conception of an intellectual community which has developed as a result of the evolution of both culture and society. We are not the only judges in our case: we expose ourselves to the judgment of peers in an intellectual community, who, though fallible like us, will strive to implement these values in criticizing our use of empirical evidence and the cogency of our theoretical reasoning. In one sense, only professionally qualified academics can do valid research concerning the academic world, but not particular academics, since any particular ones are exposed, not only to criticism but to competition. This study is intended as a contribution to the self-conscious understanding of the academic community and through it of the society and culture of which it is a part. As in all intellectual endeavor, perfection is beyond our reach. But this does not mean that a claim to relative objectivity should be rejected a priori.⁹

⁹ Francois Bourricaud, Unjoersite's a la derive: France, Etat-Unis, Amirique du

Sod (Pans, Stock, 1971).