Reconstructing the University

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-41
Author(s):  
Keith Tribe

The ‘modern university’—research-based, in which teaching and research are pursued by academic specialists organised departmentally—was created in the United States in the later nineteenth century in a productive misunderstanding of the organisation of knowledge and teaching in contemporary German universities. While the latter enjoyed international recognition, academic careers remained in thrall to an apprenticeship structure in which senior staff represented their entire discipline, supported by their juniors. The American structure, fostered by endowments and grants, presumed that departments would be composed of specialists who advanced their careers by developing their specialism. This was decisive for the disciplinary development of universities around the world. In London, the university was a federal, administrative body whose degree courses could be followed both within Britain and in the wider Empire. As a component part of this structure, the London School of Economics shared in this reach, and so came to dominate the teaching of the social sciences in Britain and the Empire.

Author(s):  
Kai Erikson

This chapter tells the story of peasants from rural Poland who entered a migrant stream around the turn of the twentieth century that carried them, along with tens of millions of others, across a number of clearly marked national borderlines as well as a number of unmarked cultural ones. The peasants were a couple named Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak, and the words spoken by them as well as the events recalled here are based on the hundreds of letters and diaries gathered in the 1910s by two sociologists from the University of Chicago, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The chapter first describes the world into which Piotr and Kasia were born, focusing on family, village, and land. It then considers their journey, together with millions of other immigrants, and how they changed both the face of Europe and the face of the United States.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Itumeleng D. Mothoagae

The question of blackness has always featured the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class. Blackness as an ontological speciality has been engaged from both the social and epistemic locations of the damnés (in Fanonian terms). It has thus sought to respond to the performance of power within the world order that is structured within the colonial matrix of power, which has ontologically, epistemologically, spatially and existentially rendered blackness accessible to whiteness, while whiteness remains inaccessible to blackness. The article locates the question of blackness from the perspective of the Global South in the context of South Africa. Though there are elements of progress in terms of the conditions of certain Black people, it would be short-sighted to argue that such conditions in themselves indicate that the struggles of blackness are over. The essay seeks to address a critique by Anderson (1995) against Black theology in the context of the United States of America (US). The argument is that the question of blackness cannot and should not be provincialised. To understand how the colonial matrix of power is performed, it should start with the local and be linked with the global to engage critically the colonial matrix of power that is performed within a system of coloniality. Decoloniality is employed in this article as an analytical tool.Contribution: The article contributes to the discourse on blackness within Black theology scholarship. It aims to contribute to the continual debates on the excavating and levelling of the epistemological voices that have been suppressed through colonial epistemological universalisation of knowledge from the perspective of the damnés.


Author(s):  
Peter Hart-Brinson

This chapter introduces the concepts of generational change, generational theory, and the social imagination, and it describes how they can help us understand the evolution of public opinion about gay marriage in the United States and the role that public opinion played in the legalization of gay marriage. It introduces the thesis that the changing social imagination was the key cultural and cognitive development that led young cohorts to develop more supportive attitudes about gay marriage while also causing older cohorts to rethink their prior opinions. It explains how the imagination both produces and draws from the cultural schemas that we use to make sense of the world and why different groups can develop different cultural schemas. It concludes by describing the overall plan of the book and the author’s standpoint.


Author(s):  
Steven Conn

This chapter examines why educational leaders and businessmen in the United States thought it was a good idea to establish business schools in the first place. The answer often offered at the time was that American business itself had grown so big and complex by the turn of the twentieth century that a new university-level education was now required for the new world of managerial work. However, the more powerful rationale was that businessmen wanted the social status and cultural cachet that came with a university degree. The chapter then looks at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1881 and became the first business school in the United States. All of the more than six hundred business schools founded in the nearly century and a half since descend from Wharton.


Traditio ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 391-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Brückmann

The importance of the manuscript pontificals for the study of the medieval evolution of the Latin liturgy needs no reaffirmation here. The state of the published descriptions and classifications of these manuscripts, however, is not commensurate in all cases with what their importance would lead one to expect.Ehrensberger has provided a full description of the manuscript pontificasl preserved in the Vatican Library; although this is no longer recent, it is invaluable in the absence of a complete catalogue of the Vatican manuscripts. The monumental work of Leroquais describes in detail the manuscript pontificals extant in the public libraries in France; as most of the pontificals in France appear to be in public libraries, this work is fairly comprehensive in its coverage. Dom Anselm Strittmatter has listed and classified the liturgical manuscripts preserved in the United States. For pontificals in other countries, however, there exist no such reference works. Professor Richard Kay of the University of Kansas is currently compiling a handlist in which all the manuscript pontificals extant throughout the world will be cited and briefly identified, but not fully described. Until this appears, anyone working on pontificals or on ordines normally included in pontificals will quite likely have to work systematically through innumerable catalogues of manuscript collections to cover every library, city by city, for a frequently minimal return.


1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-122
Author(s):  
Ronald Watts

This was the second in a series of three conferences on public policy, organised by the University of East Africa and financed by the Ford Foundation, whose aim is to bring together policy-makers and academics for discussions on major public issues.In attendance were delegations, of at least a dozen each, from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanganyika, consisting mainly of Cabinet Ministers, parliamentary secretaries, other M.P.s, and civil servants, as well as representatives of public corporations, political parties, and trade unions. Small delegations from Ethiopia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia, and Zanzibar were also invited. A group of 10 ‘visiting specialists’ from overseas with experience of federal systems and problems elsewhere were invited to take part. Among these were six economists: Ursula Hicks and Arthur Hazlewood from Oxford, Pitamber Pant of the Indian Planning Commission, Vladimir Kollontai from Moscow, Jan Auerhan from Prague, and Benton Massell (who was unable to attend but contributed a paper) from the United States. The others were a lawyer, S. A. de Smith from the London School of Economics, and three political scientists, Arthur MacMahon of Columbia University, A. H. Birch from Hull University, and myself. A group of a dozen ‘local specialists’ drawn mainly from E.A.C.S.O. and from the economists, lawyers, and political scientists at the University Colleges in East Africa also presented papers and played a significant role in the discussions. The total number of participants, including 22 observers, amounted to over 90.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Egil Asprem

The election of the 45th president of the United States set in motion a hidden war in the world of the occult. From the meme-filled underworld of alt-right-dominated imageboards to a widely publicized “binding spell” against Trump and his supporters, the social and ideological divides ripping the American social fabric apart are mirrored by witches, magicians, and other esotericists fighting each other with magical means. This article identifies key currents and developments and attempts to make sense of the wider phenomenon of why and how the occult becomes a political resource. The focus is on the alt-right’s emerging online esoteric religion, the increasingly enchanted notion of “meme magic,” and the open confrontation between different magical paradigms that has ensued since Trump’s election in 2016. It brings attention to the competing views of magical efficacy that have emerged as material and political stakes increase, and theorizes the religionizing tendency of segments of the alt-right online as a partly spontaneous and partially deliberate attempt to create “collective effervescence” and galvanize a movement around a charismatic authority. Special focus is given to the ways in which the politicized magic of both the left and the right produce “affect networks” that motivate political behaviors through the mobilization of (mostly aversive) emotions.


1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Coats

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jieli Chen

The University of Cincinnati is the birthplace of the paid internship program in the world and it has the most number of compulsory paid internship programs in the United States. Their paid internship education program has rich experience and remarkable results in curriculum arrangement, internship management and government support. However, the internship for vocational colleges in China faces problems such as low enthusiasm from industry, difficulty in internship management and insufficient government support. Drawing on the experience of paid internship education in the United States, the school and the industry jointly planned the internship training program, and finally established a collaboration model that benefits the three parties of the academia, the industry and the students.


Author(s):  
Eileen Barker

Bryan Ronald Wilson (1926–2004), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a world-renowned sociologist of religion. He was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of Oxford in 1994, the same year that he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Wilson was also awarded an Arnold Gerstenberg studentship, which allowed him to take up a place at the London School of Economics, where Maurice Ginsberg introduced him to the literature of the sociology of religion and where he developed a life-long interest in sectarian movements. He returned to Yorkshire to take up an Assistant Lectureship in Sociology in the Department of Social Studies at the University of Leeds in October 1955, being promoted to Lecturer in 1957. There Wilson taught courses on urban sociology, sociological theory, and the social institutions of modern Britain, as well as on the sociology of religion. He was a Fellow of All Souls College for thirty years. The themes of secularisation, rationalism, and sectarianism were of particular interest to Wilson throughout his academic life.


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