The Books of My Life: Wisdom’s Workshop

I have long had an interest in higher education. I am interested in academia as a bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that has changed just as broader society has changed over the years. I am interested in the economic aspects of institutions of higher education and the role economic interests have played and continue to play in colleges and universities in the core nation world and particularly in the British settler society world. I am interested in the politics of universities both internally and externally and the impact political bureaucracies have on academic bureaucracies and vice versa. I am interested in the demographics of universities and how these have changed over the years. I am interested in the historical and cultural geography of universities and the ideologies associated with notions of how colleges and universities should look. I am interested in the culture and subcultures and countercultures of universities, a culture and cultures that mirror while the broader world while, at the same time, wanting to change the world for the better (there is a lot of utopianism among university faculty, some of them old bohemians gone bourgeois, though only those in the applied sciences generally manage to change the world if not for the better).

James Axtell’s Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) explores the economic, political, demographic, geographic, and cultural history of the university from the Mediaeval era to the modern American research university or multiversity. and megaversity era. Along the way Axtell briefly, for example, explores the the Mediaeval, Tudor and Stuart (Oxbridge) and 19th century German precedents for the American research university, the historical genealogies of academic bureaucracies, the role faculties play in universities and the cultures associated with university faculties, tensions between the administrative bureaucracy and faculty guilds in universities, the built environment of universities, student life at universities, tensions between universities and the broader society including powerful economic interests particularly over the curriculum, the increasing use of part-time or contingent faculty in American universities (something paralleled in Canadian research universities as well), and the increasing ties between the university, government, and private corporations in his synthetic history of the modern university. Axtell ends his book by noting that American research university are overrepresented among the top universities globally in all the guides which rate universities around the worlds.

As a comparative history Axtell’s book is far too selective. Axtell largely ignores higher education developments Germany and Great Britain in the 20th and 21st century, somewhat surprisingly since the new post-World War II in Britain generally mimicked the post-war American research universities. He ignores Canadian universities like the University of Toronto, which, like the universities he does focus on, is a member of the elite Association of American Universities, the pan-bureaucratic arm of the elite American research university. And while these points may or may not be relevant—Axtell’s focus was on the rise of the American elite research university after all—something else he ignores, namely the fact that the size and wealth of the American economy, itself a product of geography, demography, and culture, is very relevant for why US research universities show up in large numbers in the lists of the top three hundred universities in the world. Sometimes size does matter and the US with its almost 400 million people (2018 estimate) gives it an economic and technological edge over smaller Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Germany. He also fails to explore the fact that there is great regional variation in the “quality” of US research universities with most of them being found in the US Northeast, Midwest, and Far West and far fewer in the South, the Northern Plains, and the Intermountain West where, again, size matters as does cultural history, particularly the culture of evangelical and secular anti-intellectualism.