Academia is an odd place, sometimes a world unto itself. Higher education’s traditions, titles and ceremonies are unique, and can be obscure and remarkably persistent. Why, after all, do students pay fees to a bursar and move a tassel on a mortar board at graduation? Why do faculty publish or perish? For those of us who have spent our careers in higher education, we adopt and adapt – and rarely probe these issues.
Histories of higher education provide some answers. Their structure and intent, though, often follows particular paths. One can find solid histories of individual institutions. One also can read quite a bit about the development of the university from the early 1800s and the German influence on the development of research universities in the United States and the rest of Europe. These histories are most effective, though, when they look at the latter part of the nineteenth century. What happened earlier? And how has it affected higher education today?
William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is an extraordinary attempt to answer that question. It’s a most unusual book, something that both explains the oddity of academia while reflecting that unusual nature. It is wild, wonderful and weird, not altogether successful, and still worthy of consideration.
Academic Charisma functions on three levels. The principal argument of the book is that the development of the research university was fueled by the growth of the German charismatic academician in the late 1700s and early 1800s: an active scholar with monastic tendencies. Clark’s understanding of charisma is akin to Weber’s. He explains these early research faculty as constrained by the German bureaucracy, ambitious and eager for influence, and driven to distinguish themselves through published scholarship. Their successes fueled further research and became the engine of the modern research university. Clark’s thesis has merit. Through the hundreds of pages of Academic Charisma, though, he loses interest in maintaining that focus and proving his argument.
Where Clark does give attention is to the exploration and unpacking of the minutiae of medieval and early modern academia. These chapters, which examine such topics as academic regalia, the oral tradition of the disputation, how grades and ranks emerge, and development of the catalog of courses, are interesting in and of themselves. They are historical, anthropological, and could, in many instances, stand on their own. The section on the development of the research library was very interesting, for example. Clark spins these chapters out with obsession, delighting at what he’s discovered in the archives.
The last theme in Clark’s tome is his interest in the emergence of the academic review. The right to review was originally found in the Catholic Church and adopted later by higher education. Clark looks at several German reviews of institutions and faculties, charting the various ways that a “rational” process was developed. The state was essential in driving through this change. It may sound unusual to be interested in a reviewer’s comments regarding a nineteenth century site visit of a German university, but as Clark cares, we care. Helping this all along is Clark’s sense of humor. He is clearly enjoying himself in sharing his fascination with the subject.
I would wager than anyone who dips into Academic Charisma will learn quite a bit. I would also suggest that most of the gains will be unexpected nuggets along the way, without necessarily serving as the focus or purpose of Clark’s larger historical journey. And as for a conclusion, only in higher education could a lengthy book as odd as this be produced with such care and obsession. It speaks to academia’s idiosyncrasies. And for that – and for William Clark – I am grateful.
David Potash