Director’s Blog

September 4, 2009

What are you Reading? Clark’s “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University,” (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

“What are You Reading? Notes from the Directors” is a regular reflection from the Director, Assistant Director, and guest reviewers that will focus on recent works in the areas of university culture, intellectual community and faculty development.

A history of the university culture is always instructive as we try to imagine ourselves anew in these challenging times. This past month, I have been reading William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Clark gives some delightful details about how in the medieval university, the idea of a “chair” actually started with the material goods that were the reward of academic work, including a physical “chair” around which students sat. While much of the author’s focus is on the German University, and the English and other European Universities providing comparative cases, readers will find his discussion useful if they are interested in the dynamics of intellectual community.

Clark compellingly describes ways in which charisma became routinized, to use sociologist Max Weber’s term, into departments and units, where most of the power of the “chair” was placed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the “traditional” university was based on an academic charisma where the individual professor not only taught, but instantiated, the religious canon , the modern university became differently organized. In the modern case, the professor’s charisma remained located in his (usually not her) person, but was regularized by the larger collegial group in a broader sphere of rationalization. The” dynamic equilibrium” between charisma and group regulation that resulted was, in Clark’s mind, a unique accomplishment of the modern university.

While the book could have used a couple more rounds of editing, Clark’s overall insights about the tension between the charisma of the collective and that of the individual are fascinating. The details of this tension, in Germany, in the USA, and in other parts of Europe, are fascinating; but my question now is: where and how might we now locate academic charisma in the twenty first century research university? It seems to me a crucial question, when we are struggling with new forms of financial interdependence across units, an interdependence which is at times at odds with our more independent professional and intellectual trajectories.

In this light, Clark’s book has some intriguing implications. While he does not address the issue directly, his work has caused me to wonder whether there might be a way to think anew about locating academic charisma in these times. What if we understood intellectual power of the university as located not within in a single unit, such as a school or department, but precisely in the interdependence between units? What if we looked again at the ways in which our collective intellectual creativity always requires a number of different disciplines, even departments or schools, to engage it? Indeed, academic charisma might still be located in a person, as it has been in the modern university professor, but that person would also be moving between those units rather than only residing within them. The traditional locales of departments and units would stay, as they should, but as a professoriate, we might be lighter on our feet.

Clark’s book also prompted me to think again about the university as a kind of localized intellectual economy. What if we practiced our intellectual craft in a way that understood the value of our discipline, but also understand the necessity of the local marketplace that requires us, like any local artisan, to bring our goods to trade? What if we made an intellectual practice of placing our own unit’s strengths squarely within the valued goods to be brought to the marketplace, while at the same time acknowledging that our very existence as intellectuals depended upon the value that others brought? And what if we also acknowledged different scales of economy: that the university is a complex local marketplace where financial capital is intertwined in significant ways with, and at times even dependent upon, academic and social capital, and vice versa?

Perhaps the stationary image of the “chair” about which Clark writes so eloquently needs to be replaced by a more mobile image of a “path” or a “road,” and a professor that does not sit in a chair, but rather moves back and forth between academic locales within a university. We might locate a new charisma precisely with this more mobile framework, in a scholar who navigates the intellectual economy of local interdependence. And in this way, in these times, we might begin to imagine anew the possibility of a community.