TO ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE
The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940
Roger L. Geiger
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
352 pp., $27.50
AMERICAN PROFESSORS
A National Resource Imperiled
Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
322 pp., $24.95
Higher education is big business in the United States. There are over 3,200 institutions of higher education, ranging from two-year colleges to research universities. Those institutions enroll more than 12 million students--or adjusting for part-timers, over 8.5 million fulltime equivalents. They have on their staffs approximately 660,000 faculty, over two-thirds of whom are full-time. Their total current expenditures in 1980-1982 amounted to over $65 billion. Perhaps more important, higher education plays a central role in what Daniel Bell has termed our contemporary "post-industrial society."
"Industrial society," Bell explained, "is the coordination of machines and men for the production of goods. Post-industrial society is organized around knowledge, for the purpose of social control and the directing of innovation and change." And he underlined the key importance of a special kind of knowledge: "What has become decisive for the organization of decisions and the direction of change is the centrality of theoretical knowledge." Accordingly, "the university, research organizations, and intellectual institutions, where theoretical knowledge is codified and enriched, become the axial structures of the emergent society."
The higher educational system in the United States is not simply larger than its counterparts around the world but more decentralized in its control and financing, thus more diverse in its makeup. Such decentralization and diversity have been responsible for the intense competition that has existed and continues to exist among American colleges and universities. That competition in turn gave rise to the distinctively American phenomenon of rating institutions by their academic quality. The research accomplishments of their faculty has been the standard most widely used in judging the quality of the institution.
As associate research scientist with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, Roger L. Geiger presents a historical account of the rise of sixteen institutions that have over time dominated such ratings. When psychologist James McKeen Cattell published his pioneer ranking of American universities in 1910 according to the number of distinguished scientists on their staffs, fourteen of those institutions were included among his top twenty. Sixty years later, the same group accounted for fifteen of the twenty-one institutions carrying out 54 percent of all university research, including the top ten which were responsible for 38 percent of the research.
Five of the institutions examined in Geiger's work date from the colonial period--Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Pennsylvania. Five are state
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