Dan, as always, it is great discussing things with you. I can offer some thoughts about why schism and school formation were allowed and why areallowed may be too optimistic. The notion is an historical one, that there was in what are now OECD countries a window of opportunity in the first two or three decades following WWII. The pessimistic note is that the window of opportunity appears to be closing.

Following the end of WWII, all of the OECD countries had an urgent problem to solve, what to do with the demobilized soldiers coming home from the wars. The soldiers needed jobs, opportunities, and training for peacetime life. The GI Bill was, along with a booming postwar/Cold War economy, the USA’s answer to that problem. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The GIs’ kids were the Baby Boomers whose numbers would create an unprecedented demand for higher education. New schools, departments, and disciplines created to meet that demand were scrambling for faculty. Demand was high, supply was low. A degree from a well-known school and a published paper or two were enough to get a job, frequently even tenure. All this would change abruptly when Baby Boomer demand peaked and schools like my first and only full-time academic employer discovered that the median age of faculty, already 80% tenured, was somewhere around forty, that they were going anywhere, and would expect salaries and benefits to rise with seniority. The days of easy employment and tenure were over.

The cultural context for these developments was the democratic myth that higher education would provide an avenue for upward social mobility. And it did, for a while. The democratization of higher education increasingly became, however, what sociologist George Ritter labeled McDonaldization, cheap, fast, we do it all for you. Gresham’s law ensured that the value of academic degrees per se collapsed. The same market polarization that kept high-end department stores like Nieman-Marcus and discounters like Walmart in business, while putting midrange chains like Woolworth’s out of business also effected higher education, with a radical split between the Harvards and Stanfords at one end and community colleges on the other, and second and third-tier public universities and their private counterparts under increasing pressure. And the problem was not confined to the old West, North America and Europe. It has been, I’d guess, at least two years since I picked up an issue of China Daily at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo, devoted to what was described as a universal problem—a massive surplus of university graduates for whom there are no jobs. We are talking about Japan, Korea, and the case of China and India, graduates in numbers bigger than the total populations of many European countries. To which we can add the information explosion powered by the Internet and other digital technologies.

In short, the good old days that some of us just missed and most of those younger than me (I am in my seventies) may never see in their lifetimes are history. The old stories about higher education leading automatically to better jobs, the supposed value vaguely described as “critical thinking,” and the notion that adding to the sum of human knowledge is a good in itself are tired and seem, except for the lucky minority who make it into the knowledge-worker elite, increasingly implausible.

None of this is to say that shifting to a neoliberal, corporate model is a good thing. It is to suggest that academia, obsessed with preserving its privileges, has failed to come up with a compelling new story with which to mobilize public and political support.

End of rant. The hobby horse is tireless. The rider is not.

As always, thanks for the thoughtful comment. It’s an interesting question about monasteries and scaling. The one I was at was tiny. The whole order, worldwide, was perhaps a couple hundred monks. So, over their orders millenia long history, they didn’t scale too well. Though they did endure. Other orders seem to scale particularly well (all sorts of Benedcitines) and they often find themselves running hospitals, universities, or all sorts of charities.

The problems that you’re running through, though, seem to be reflective of larger currents of history (the rise of Protestantism, say, in the case of the dissolution of the monasteries in England), rather than any trouble scaling might have from unstable or inevitably stultifying processes inside the monastery. My take is that Catholic monastic life goes through cycles of routinization and charismatic revitalization (a la Weber and Wallace). And it seems to do this in the context of all sorts of different state societies, if given a minimal level of tolerance.

Perhaps if we’re thinking about the ability of these types of institutions to scale, and keeping universities in mind, we might wonder about how, if at all, disciplines and departments, schools and universities are able to allow schism and school formation. To my mind, this invites a conversation about how costly it is for academics to enter the game, leave the game, and the impossibility of starting your own school or department.