Below are some of the materials/people that inform my life currently. I will slowly add more over the semester and hope they will inspire visitors to comment on them or suggest new authors, titles, or ideas for me to explore:
This one probably needs an introduction. William Clark’s “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University” is an exploration of the slow progression from traditional to modern conceptions of the academic world and the academic persona. Based on a reading of Max Weber’s three forms of authority, Clark explores the bureaucratization and commodification of the academic world, two forces he describes as “the twin engines of the rationalization and disenchantment of the world” (Clark, 3). The characterization Clark gives of the early academic world is one defined by nepotism; a place where judiciary and ecclesiastical disciplines held the greatest sway, and a place where the oral dominated the written word. Chapter by chapter, Clark uses curious, perhaps mundane, pieces of material culture from universities to explore the development of the research university. Lecture catalogues, paintings, visitation tables, and library catalogues all become interesting sites of investigation in Clark’s adept hands. Modern universities, on Clark’s understanding, are those defined by the triumph of “the visible and the rational” over the “oral and the traditional” (Clark, 3). In the modern, market driven university, managed by the cold quantifying ministries of the German state, oral culture seems to have been replaced by a focus on the written word or number. Disputations were replaced by dissertations, the examination lost its oral components, dossiers on professors were collected, and grading systems were implemented; academics and their authority “would be manufactured by publications and written expert or peer review, instead of by old-fashioned academic disputational oral arts, unsubstantiated rumors, and provincial gossip” (Clark, 29). Academic oral culture, according to Clark, would not be done away with entirely; traditional and oral culture is preserved in a number of managerial practices and continues to inform (for better or worse) the lives of academics. Engaging early modern German, English, and Jesuit institutes, Clark’s book is a vastly researched, well thought out, and tactfully written piece of intellectual history. Check it out if you get the chance.
