Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology): 14 - Hardcover

Stevens, Mitchell; Miller–idriss, Cynthia; Shami, Seteney

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 069115869X ISBN 13: 9780691158693

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2018

Synopsis

An in-depth look at why American universities continue to favor U.S.-focused social science research despite efforts to make scholarship more cosmopolitan U.S. research universities have long endeavored to be cosmopolitan places, yet the disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology have remained stubbornly parochial. Despite decades of government and philanthropic investment in international scholarship, the most prestigious academic departments still favor research and expertise on the United States. Why? Seeing the World answers this question by examining university research centers that focus on the Middle East and related regional area studies. Drawing on candid interviews with scores of top scholars and university leaders to understand how international inquiry is perceived and valued inside the academy, Seeing the World explains how intense competition for tenure-line appointments encourages faculty to pursue "American" projects that are most likely to garner professional advancement. At the same time, constrained by tight budgets at home, university leaders eagerly court patrons and clients worldwide but have a hard time getting departmental faculty to join the program. Together these dynamics shape how scholarship about the rest of the world evolves. At once a work-and-occupations study of scholarly disciplines, an essay on the formal organization of knowledge, and an inquiry into the fate of area studies, Seeing the World is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of knowledge in a global era.

About this title

About the Author

Mitchell L. Stevens is associate professor of education at Stanford University. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is associate professor of education and sociology at American University. Seteney Shami is a program director at the Social Science Research Council and founding director of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences.

From the Back Cover

"Seeing the World addresses an interesting and weighty question: Why are the social sciences so poorly represented in area studies? The authors and their collaborators conducted and analyzed a treasure trove of interviews with leading academics in area studies, particularly Middle East studies, and the book provides both empirical and theoretical advances."--Jerry A. Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania

"This is a vital book. The debate about the role of universities in global understanding starts here. This short book is full of insights about how the world has shaped American universities and how universities have shaped what we think about the world."--Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University

"With extensive interviews and other data, Seeing the World explains critical variations in understanding area studies and the mechanisms that enable their interdisciplinary reproduction in leading US universities. This book should not only clarify thinking about the international missions of US universities, but also improve how their globalizing knowledge networks function in practice."--Michael D. Kennedy, Brown University

"Seeing the World combines impressive ambition and empirical depth with a powerful comparative approach to make a significant contribution to our understanding of area studies."--Jason Owen-Smith, University of Michigan

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Seeing The World

How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era

By Mitchell L. Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Seteney Shami

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15869-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction: Seeing through the Academy, 1, 
Chapter 1: The World in US Universities, 8, 
Chapter 2: What Is Area Studies?, 27, 
Chapter 3: Departments and Not-Departments, 39, 
Chapter 4: Stone Soup, 61, 
Chapter 5: Numbers and Languages, 83, 
Chapter 6: US Universities in the World, 104, 
Appendix: Methods and Data, 119, 
Notes, 143, 
Index, 159, 

CHAPTER 1

The World in US Universities

By definition, universities comprise the universe of knowledge, the whole of what is known. This conceit is a challenge for academic managers. Deciding how the whole of knowledge should be approximated, and how specialist scholars should be chosen, placed, and put into commerce with one another are fundamental planning tasks for any institution of higher learning. Here we consider one aspect of this conceit: how US universities have refracted knowledge about the rest of the world, over time and into the present. We want to know how universities organize the tasks of making and disseminating scholarship about things beyond US national borders. This chapter provides an overview of three primary ways in which US universities have done this throughout their history.

We also make a novel argument about universities: they are cumulative organizations. They retain things: tenured faculty, functions, programs of study, library and museum collections, and entire means and mechanisms for producing knowledge. This tendency toward retention is exceptional in a contemporary world in which management and therapeutic experts alike preach the virtues of flexibility, downsizing, shedding baggage, and letting go. Universities' predilection for retention continues nevertheless, making them ever more complex organizations as they move through time. The implications of this accumulated complexity for the character of knowledge production and academic careers are among this book's central concerns.

To understand how university leaders and scholars make sense of the rest of the world at different moments in history, we borrow the notion of schemata from scholars in cognitive science. Schemata are "knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information." Like the image on the box of a jigsaw puzzle, a schema enables people to assemble bits of knowledge into a coherent whole. Think of academic inquiries about the rest of the world as an ever-accumulating pile of puzzle pieces. Schemata — sets of preexisting assumptions, ideas, opinions, or principles that may or may not be held consciously — enable academic planners to place those inquiries into more or less coherent intellectual and organizational designs. A schema for making sense of the world provides the default assumptions on which myriad academic decisions are made. They are as often implied as explicitly stated: subtly in evidence when (for examples) faculty and fund-raisers make arguments about what a university "needs" that it doesn't already have; when deans and provosts defend decisions about why particular faculty or endowments "belong" together; or when young scholars plot careers in light of "where the field is going." Schemata simplify otherwise daunting complexity and make it amenable for practical organizational expression at particular places and times.

Three general schemata have informed how academic leaders have conceived of the relationship between their schools and the rest of the world throughout the history of US higher education. The first is a civilizational schema that defines schools as repositories of knowledge and artifacts about other places and peoples that can usefully inform the education of young citizens. In this schema the rest of the world is imagined as a discrete number of distinct and bounded cultural, linguistic, and/or ethno-religious traditions. The second is a national schema that defines schools as consultants to the US state in its geopolitical ambitions worldwide. In this schema the rest of the world is imagined as a mosaic of nation-states clustered in "areas" of academic and political concern. The third is a global schema that defines schools as cosmopolitan agents ecumenical in patronage and borderless in reach. In this schema the rest of the world is imagined as a complex of flows — of people, capital, ideas, goods, and services — often leveraged for university benefit through myriad interorganizational joint ventures.

We refer to all three schemata in the present tense because despite their chronological emergence, no prior one disappears as a subsequent one arises. The schemata and their organizational artifacts accumulate over time, accreting a complicated intramural ecology amenable to the metaphor of a coral reef. Although the introduction of each schema might be marked by pivotal historical events — the founding of the United States, World War II, and the end of the Cold War, respectively — the transitions between schemata are not crisp. Instead universities accumulate schemata and their various organizational expressions over time.

Table 1.1 provides a summary of the arguments we elaborate in subsequent pages.

We recognize that our treatment is written at a great analytic distance. We have neither the space nor the varied expertise required to fully portray the rich historical evolution that is skeletally depicted here. Our goal is to suggest what sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki has called a "historical sociology of the present:" a critical recognition of features of the past that are implicated in contemporary institutional arrangements.

Civilizing Others and Ourselves

When we speak of a civilizational schema we refer to how American educators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the world in terms of coherent historical legacies and geographically contiguous cultural regions. This schema was both a consequence of and a contributor to the intellectual project of imperialism, which imagined modern Europe as an apex of historical evolution and an Archimedean point from which to view the rest of the world. John Willinsky has thoughtfully detailed how nineteenth-century instructional materials of all kinds helped shape Euro-American publics' perceptions of the world as divided into primitive and civilized, or East and West. Museums, gardens, maps, encyclopedias, traveling exhibitions, zoos, and botanical displays served to "educate the eye to divide the world according to the patterns of empire." In their approaches to the rest of the world, American colleges did much the same thing.

This claim may seem paradoxical given the United States' founding antipathy to empire and the regional parochialism of its schools at their founding. Congress declined to mandate Thomas Jefferson's proposal for a national university during the early years of the new republic, leaving the task of higher learning to states and local communities. Americans took up the charge with great enthusiasm. Religious pluralism meant that leaders of every Christian tradition and denomination wanted to build schools to grow their own faiths and train their own successors. Westward expansion brought additional incentives for school founding, as frontier businesspeople and civic leaders built colleges to signal that their places were cosmopolitan destinations, on the make and on the rise. The names of many schools — the Universities of Rochester, Michigan, and California, for example — clearly reflect their founding priority as markers of place.

Yet even while the early colleges were religiously and regionally parochial, their founding missions invariably included the cultural edification of students and local communities. This meant instruction in the lives and wisdom of distant others. Early college leaders and faculty regarded themselves as keepers and teachers of civilizations instantiated in languages, literary and philosophical texts, and artistic artifacts. They organized curricula in languages and history conceived in categorical and epochal terms. Course catalogues and library displays named ancient Roman, Ottoman, and Far Eastern civilizations. Even with the rise of new ideas about science and service to region that coevolved with the land-grant movement around the time of the Civil War, in their regard for the rest of the world USacademic leaders maintained core missions as civilizational archivists and civilizing instructors.

Modeled on British and German traditions, curricula in American colleges inherited and perpetuated systems of knowledge categorization that had emerged through European colonialism. Scholarly domains explicitly defined by what Europeans found exotic, such as Oriental studies, Egyptology, and anthropology, fostered ways of thinking about the world as divided into specifiable, bounded cultures. As Michael Kennedy and Miguel Centeno have argued, the idea that distant civilizations had their own cultural logics shaped "the ways in which we recognize similarities and differences, and even envision space and time[.]" The civilizational schema posits civilizations as tangible things. Traces of them can be collected and represented in a local academic organization through expert faculty, library collections, artifact displays, visiting natives, and seasoned travelers.

This schema has proved remarkably durable. It survived even the fundamental reorganization of the US academy into disciplinary departments at the turn of the twentieth century. This process, which we discuss in detail in Chapter 3, entailed the reciprocal development of the undergraduate major and the academic professional associations that would ultimately organize faculty labor markets around topical abstractions. The study of arts and letters came to be organized by departments defined by language, period, and genre. A domain of social inquiry once called "political economy" divided into occupational and intellectual categories of economics, political science, and sociology. While the new social sciences were implicitly and preponderantly about US society, the civilizational schema lived on through departments and various academic units devoted to the study of others: European languages and history; anthropology, archeology, and classics departments; and institutes of Oriental studies. Many of these units have survived into the present.

In the Nation's Service

The nation-state as the primary and presumptive frame for apprehending societies was long in the making. Edward Said, among others, has shown how the building of the nation-state in Europe — in all its facets, from domestic life to economy — was dependent on maintaining empire abroad. After World War II, as the last colonial empires crumbled, the rest of the world began to be described as "new nations" or "developing nations" or "newly independent states." The civilizational schema lost its dominance in US academic life, even while the disciplines and research agendas it had produced continued and even flourished.

For the social sciences, the years immediately following World War II were pivotal. They saw the creation of a new way of organizing regional inquiry that would come to be called area studies, and a newly explicit notion of universities as agents of national service. Both phenomena were implicated in the rise of the US (sometimes called the "first new nation") as the hegemonic world power, as well as the military ascent of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a so-called "third world" as a theatre of Cold War competition. We call this the national schema because its champions imagined universities as consultants to the US government and its larger ambitions in the world. Although a few of the most prestigious schools of the nineteenth century had made explicit commitments to national service, mostly in their efforts to create a national leadership class through their undergraduate enrollments, most universities were focused primarily on service to their home regions into and through the world wars. This changed dramatically after 1945. Emboldened by steadily expanding government contracts for research during wartime mobilizations and by the history-making GI Bill, which swelled university classrooms with returning veterans, academics' strategic appreciation for the value of national service steadily grew. Many American academics eagerly embraced new roles as Cold War consultants to the United States in world affairs, and benefited from steady funding from the US military and allied government agencies. Indeed this period is so important for the current fate of social knowledge production on world regions that we devote Chapter 2 to depicting it.

World Wars I and II transformed America's implication in world affairs and encouraged change in how its citizens regarded distant others. Military service and war news from abroad meant that foreign places became significantly more present in the lives of ordinary Americans. For academics, the international became a vast frontier of tantalizing problems whose investigation might be subsidized by government funding. In the wake of scientists' myriad contributions to military endeavors during the wars, federal agencies continued to view universities as vital sources of expert knowledge that could be deployed in service to national security during peacetime and, through the "development" of foreign places, to US national interests all over the world. George Steinmetz notes that "military sources made up the largest share of social science funding from World War II until well into the 1960s. "During this period universities became ever more elemental to the "government out of sight" that gave the United States a large and diffuse state apparatus through cooperating social institutions. The federal government would continue to invest heavily in universities for a wide range of defense and diplomacy efforts throughout the subsequent decades.

It was a heady time for academics, one that rewarded faith in the progressive value of applied social science knowledge. Taking advantage of steady government patronage, university leaders eagerly pursued new roles for their institutions in the orchestration of world affairs. Not everyone viewed the strengthening relationship between government and universities positively. The sociologist C. Wright Mills sharply criticized what he viewed as social scientists' irresponsible turn away from scholarly autonomy as they collaborated with clients in government, the military, and the private sector, warning that "if social science is not autonomous, it cannot be a publicly responsible enterprise." The Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) was founded in 1951 with an explicit aim to counter mainstream sociology's shift toward scientism and service to the federal government with an alternative movement that might retain the discipline's critical edge. But many social scientists embraced the turn to national service, signing on as consultants to a wide range of military and governmental agencies and contributing to the growing prestige of quantitative analyses of large national and transnational datasets underwritten by government agencies.

Under the national schema, knowledge about the rest of world has two broad purposes. First, it provides strategic intelligence about specific world regions in service to the US government's national security needs. During the waning years of World War II, academic experts on the Soviet Union had already embraced their new role as what historian David Engerman has called the "professor-consultant," advising Washington elites on foreign policy decisions even as they continued to publish and teach on their home campuses. Their protagonists boasted "that the 'new social sciences' could shape the postwar period as much as atomic physics had shaped the war itself." The onset of the Cold War added urgency to the perceived need for scholarly knowledge on Eastern Europe especially, spurring the federal government and foundations to expand funding to support a national cadre of regional experts. Research agendas, faculty hires, institutes, and programs of study focusing on foreign regions expanded dramatically during the 1950s and '60s.

Second, under the national schema academic expertise is expected to progressively improve the human condition. During the early Cold War this expectation took the form of a scientific/intellectual movement under the banner of modernization theory, what Michael Kennedy and Miguel Centeno have justly called "one of the most remarkably internationalist projects ever." Its purview encompassed both the industrialized "first world" of the United States and Europe and a vast swath of the globe called the "third world," whose problems included food scarcity, poverty, inadequate infrastructure, fragile political institutions, and ethnic conflict. The basic tenet of modernization theory was that given the right inputs any country might eventually develop into a democratic, industrialized, and reasonably prosperous nation-state. With the asserted centrality of capitalist markets, the overall enterprise also entailed pulling new nations away from the Soviet orbit, tightly conjoining political and economic goals. Imagining modernization and development as a linear scale along which societies progressed enabled its American proponents to distinguish their efforts from preceding colonialisms and their assertion of hierarchies between rulers and ruled, while also enabling American academics to place their own nation at a pinnacle of virtuous development. Modernization theory encouraged a view of the United States as the "yardstick against which the achievements and failures of other countries were measured," as Björn Wittrock has put it. "While this was about explaining how other societies might change," write Kennedy and Centeno, "it was also about America itself and its view of the good society." The alignment of several forces — the progress of decolonization, the optimism of twentieth-century social science, chronic vagaries of the Cold War conflict — combined to catapult social scientists' ideas about modernization and development into prominence in the 1950s and 1960s.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 069115869X
• ISBN 13: 9780691158693
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184