September-October 2007

Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. William Clark. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006, 576 pages, $22.50 paperback.

Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education’s Strategic Imperative. Judith M. Gappa, Ann E. Austin, and Andrea G. Trice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007, 400 pages, $40.00 hardcover.


Readers of Change are probably familiar with Clark Kerr’s observation about the historical endurance of universities. Some 85 institutions have survived in recognizable form from 1520 to the present, Kerr wrote in The Uses of the University, including the Roman Catholic Church; the parliaments of Britain, Iceland, and the Isle of Mann; a number of Swiss cantons—and about 70 universities. “Kings that rule, feudal lords with vassals, and guilds with monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways” (2001, p.115). No doubt that is true. However, two important new books give these still waters a vigorous stir.

Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, by William Clark, traces many of the contemporary academy’s most characteristic practices—including written examinations, doctoral dissertations, and “publish or perish”—to a process of rationalization imposed on central European universities by markets and ministries from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. Picking up the story in the United States today, Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education’s Strategic Imperative, by Judith Gappa, Ann Austin, and Andrea Trice, shows how faculty careers continue to shift and what might be done to preserve what’s most attractive about “traditional” professorial life. Clark is interested in the historical development of academic charisma, an elusive concept meaning (roughly) the changing grounds of professorial reputation and authority. Gappa, Austin, and Trice are concerned with the academic profession’s collective loss of charisma, and they hope to stave off its impending demise.

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