Stanford University Press
Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century
Key Metrics
- David John Frank
- Stanford University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780804753753
- 9 X 6.32 X 0.77 inches
- 1.05 pounds
- Education > Higher
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Current conversations on the state of academia contain a broad sense of crisis over changes in the body of university knowledge--the decline of literature, the unbridling of ethnic studies, the growth of various applied programs, and so on. Much of the concern revolves around a perceived deterioration of the academic core in which, the thinking goes, the university's teaching and research priorities are increasingly compromised by external financial and political interests.
With data on faculty and course composition over the twentieth century for a global sample of universities, this book provides an examination unprecedented in scope and scale of changes in academia. The authors document the changing emphases accorded the branches of learning, the applied and basic divisions, and the disciplinary fields. They find deep transformations, as anticipated, but offer a new explanation for these shifts. Changes in academic focus are less the work of outside interest groups, but instead are cultural maps to the altering features of globally institutionalized understandings of reality.
Author Bio
David John Frank is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and the coauthor of Reconstructing the University
My research analyzes the cultural and organizational underpinnings of world society. In particular, my work examines the changing definition of the human-nature relationship, as expressed in the rise of the global environmental movement; the changing definition of sex, as expressed in shifting criminal regulations and human rights; and the changing definition of knowledge, as expressed in the evolution and expansion of the university curriculum.
Current projects focus on the university and the global knowledge society (with John W. Meyer) and the emergence of LGBTQ public life in countries around the world. I hold degrees in sociology from the University of Chicago (B.A.) and Stanford University (M.A. and Ph.D.). Before coming to the University of California, Irvine, in 2002, I served on the sociology faculty at Harvard University.
Education
Stanford University
Ph.D. in Sociology,1989
M.A. in Sociology,1988
University of Chicago
B.A. in Sociology, with honors, 1981
Source: University of California, Irvine
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