The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520079973 ISBN 13: 9780520079977

Verlag: University of California Press, 1993

Inhaltsangabe

A powerful international roster of scholars presents the first comprehensive discussion of advanced education in Germany, Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. For each nation, a detailed overview of the historical development and current conditions of graduate education is followed by an analysis of disciplines and departments.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Burton R. Clark is Allan M. Carter Professor of Higher Education and Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. Author of The Higher Education System (California, 1983), he also edited The Academic Profession (1987), and The School and the University (1985) for California.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"A gold mine of information . . . it breathes experience, prudence, and wisdom . . . [and] will undoubtedly become a standard work of consultation in this country and abroad."—Sheldon Rothblatt, University of California, Berkeley

Aus dem Klappentext

"A gold mine of information . . . it breathes experience, prudence, and wisdom . . . [and] will undoubtedly become a standard work of consultation in this country and abroad."Sheldon Rothblatt, University of California, Berkeley

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan

By Burton Robert Clark, editor

University of California Press

Copyright © 1993 Burton Robert Clark, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520079973
Introduction

Our five-country analysis begins with Germany, where an early marriage of scientific research and university education first led to the development of research-based universities. Claudius Gellert highlights the original meaning of the Humboldtian ideal of a unity of research, teaching, and study—of education through science—and the subsequent evolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of practices developed in the name of this commanding ideal. Wilhelm von Humboldt placed the subject, not the student, at the center of his conception. In seminars and laboratories, professors and students were to join hands in the pursuit of new knowledge. Whatever the later ideological shifts in this central doctrine, the pragmatic result was a set of universities geared to academic research. By the last half of the nineteenth century, German universities were widely considered the most advanced in the world, attracting students and visiting scholars from other countries who sought to learn the newest methods of inquiry. Here were universities that concentrated on specialized research and the preparation of research specialists. Advanced education received sturdy research foundations.

However, this classic elite system has been buffeted throughout much of the twentieth century. During the first three decades the entrenched power of chairholding professors deepened the rigidities flowing from a closed academic oligarchy, with its small constraining monopolies of power. The Fascist period then brought an immense loss of talent, the denial of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and, by 1945, a deep crisis of legitimacy for a tainted professoriate. All claims to intellectual preeminence had been lost. And hardly had German officials and scholars partially restored the universities to the ethos and capability they possessed before the rise of Hitler when expansion into mass higher education, begin-

ning in the 1960s, hit with growing force. Gellert reviews in detail the effects of a fivefold expansion between 1960 and the mid-1980s: the development of Fachhochschulen as a fast-expanding "nonuniversity" sector favored by government; the extensive overcrowding of students in universities designed for one-third or one-half of actual enrollment; the concomitant shift in professorial duties from research to teaching; and the growing anonymity of the student in the mass university, especially within a historic structure that had only weak curricular organization and that put great store in the capacity of "mature" students to make their own way among courses, programs, and universities.

The drift of research, pure and applied, from universities to other enterprises, for example, the Max Planck institutes, is yet another threat to the unity of research and teaching. If the Humdoldtian legacy is a stubborn one in Germany, much talked about and much praised, the German universities are operationally in a muddle and the old ideal is perhaps more hindrance than help. The system struggles to effect a productive differentiation among and within institutions which will maintain the unity of research, teaching, and study in certain locales even though it is explicitly and fully surrendered in others.

German higher education in the contemporary period is therefore experiencing considerable difficulty in differentiating and supporting an advanced level of university training. But inside and outside the academy, the commitment to research runs deep. The struggle is to find the organizational and funding patterns that will keep that commitment closely related to teaching and advanced study. On this critical matter, the two chapters on Germany prepared by Claudius Gellert have much to say.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Research Foundations of Graduate Education: Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japanby Burton Robert Clark, editor Copyright © 1993 by Burton Robert Clark, editor. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520079973
• ISBN 13: 9780520079977
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 412
• Herausgeber: Clark Burton R.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar