Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies

Series Editor: Barbie Zelizer (University of Pennsylvania)

Dedicated to bringing to the foreground the central impulses by which we engage in inquiry, the Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies series attempts to make explicit the ways in which we craft our intellectual grasp of the world.

Making the University Matter

Explorations in Communication and History Edited by Barbie Zelizer The Changing Faces ofJournalism Edited by Barbie Zelizer T h e Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives Edited by Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender Making the University Matter Edited by Barbie Zelizer C ommunication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks Edited by jeremy Packer and Steve Wiley

Edited by Barbie Zelizer

~~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up
LO NDO N AND NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION
Assessing the influence of institutional and technological change
Angela M. Lee and Deborah Lubken

The institutional parameters of higher education have shifted in recent years, shaping social relationships within the academic community as well as the processes through which knowledge is produced, organized, stored, disseminated, and evaluated. The widespread implementation of what have been variously termed "new" or "digital" media has played no small part in these transformations, engendering a mixture of hope and anxiety. Yet present-day critiques echo responses to earlier moments of technological and institutional change . C enturies before the advent of th e internet or the twenty-four-hour news cycle, for example, information overload - from a perceived unchecked proliferation of books - prompted a profound reassessment of scholarly strategies for accessing, organizing, and archiving textual material, including the outsourcing of note- taking duties to support staff 1 Technological advances and institutional change are typically greeted with a mixture of expectation and trepidation, but the digital revolution and contemporary institutional changes have resulted from complex, specific historical circumstances that must be assessed to grapple with, and perhaps shape, the possibilities for the university's future . The essays in this section chart the institutional landscape by examining the past, gauging the present moment, and forecasting future developments in contexts ranging from the classroom to the enterprise of scholarly publishing. Contributors not only assess the broad influences of technology on the university, including the potential uses of technology by various constituencies in affecting institutional change, but they also ask how particular institutional configurations and articulations may amplifY and muffle the effects of specific technologies. They investigate the roles of technology in shaping the ways that students, faculty, administrators, and academic disciplines interact with each other, as well as the ways that these entities use technology to shape their identities and jostle for position within the university. Of particular interest to this volume are the implications of institutional and technological change for the body of activity carried out under the auspices of communication and media

176 Angela M. Lee and Deborah Lubken

research. How have institutional developments in the field's past influenced its present situation within higher education? - its object(s) of study; its place, in terms of both structure and legitimacy, with respect to other fields, disciplines, and projects that have staked their claim on similar intellectual territory; and its prospects for the future?

17
THE INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE ERA OF DIGITAL INFORMATION
Dominic Boyer

Note
1 Ann Blair, "Reading strategies for coping with information overload ca. 1550-1700," Journal of the H istory of Ideas 64(1), 2003, 11-28.

Introduction: a digital revolution?

Although Jthe incorporation of digital information and communication technologies (hereafter: digital ICTs) into higher education has proceeded unevenly from a global p erspective, it is fair to say that there is scarcely a dimension of academic life in advanced iindustrial countries that has not been profoundly affected by digital media over the p.ast quarter century. 1 The idea of a digital revolution in academic communication is a powerful one, but an idea that also deserves careful, critical examination. Even if we conclude that digital ICTs have revolutionized the practices of making and circulating academic knowledge, we must historicize their impact by looking closely at the institutions they have transformed in order to understand better where digital ICTs might take us in the future, and how we citizens of the three estates of the modem university students, faculty, and administrators - can work to shape future institutional forms. I hope to make a contribution to that project of greater historical and institutional contextualization in this chapter.

The western university as historical, institutional assemblage

Contemporary western universities are complex institutional assemblages. Their complexity is, in no small part, a comment on their long and generally successful course of historical development. At the beginning, matters were much simpler. Universities essentially began as a contractual institution that mediated an exchange of expertise between two social estates: students and masters. T h e university takes its name from the medieval universitas (meaning "the whole"), a kind of general corporation used by students and masters to contract reciprocal teaching and learning obligations with one another. 2 Although principally aristocratic, the ranks of students and masters were also