Abstract
Keywords
If universities by definition are supposed to comprise the universe of knowledge, the whole of what is known, how have American universities then organized the task of making and disseminating scholarship about things beyond the United States’ borders? This question constitutes the point of departure of Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era, in which Mitchell L Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Khalid Shami provide the reader with new insights into how American academia, over time and into the present, has tried to make sense of the world, and, in particular, how programs devoted to the study of world regions are organized.
The volume is one of the outcomes of a larger project housed at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) on ‘the production of knowledge on world regions’ that began at the turn of the new millennium. The authors have three primary aims for the volume: first, they want to provide insights into the mechanics of knowledge production at the arts-and-sciences cores of US research universities by examining how universities transform money and intellect into knowledge and how the knowledge work at the core universities in United States are linked with patron preferences and world affairs; second, they intend to contribute to the understanding of universities as special mechanisms for seeing and making sense of the world, and finally they want to provide an understanding of why US universities themselves change and how they manage to reorganize themselves continually while retaining stable identities over time.
These three aims are realized through a qualitative-comparative strategy, where the authors provide a macro-perspective on trends and currents in the part of American academia devoted to the study of world regions and combine this with excerpts from some of the 73 interviews done with faculty and administrators at eight highly regarded research universities with multiple centers funded by the Title VI program.
The volume is divided into an introduction, six substantive chapters and a long appendix on the methods and data the volume is based on. Following the introduction, the first chapter outlines a schematic description of how US universities have conceived of the rest of the world throughout their history. Three ideal typical kinds of ‘schemata’ for seeing the world are presented, each of which are characterized by a set of preexisting assumptions, ideas, opinions or principles that may not necessarily be held consciously but enable academic planners to place their inquiries into more or less coherent intellectual and organizational designs. According to the first ‘civilizational schema’, the world is imagined as a discrete number of distinct and bounded cultural, linguistic and/or ethno-religious traditions and the universities are perceived as repositories of knowledge and artifacts about other places and peoples that can usefully inform the education of young citizens. In the second ‘national schema’ the rest of the world is imagined as a mosaic of national-states in ‘areas’ of academic and geopolitical concern and universities are perceived as consultants to the US state in its geopolitical ambitions worldwide. The last ‘global schema’ perceives the world as a complex flow of people, ideas, goods, capital and services and universities are from this perspective regarded as cosmopolitan agents ecumenical in patronage and borderless in reach. These three schemata are to some extent linked to different eras in US history: before, during and after the Cold War. Still, they are connected in the sense that new ways of thinking about the world and their attendant organizational strategies are layered on top of prior ones, similar to a coral reef, which is a composite of organisms at varying stages of development and decay.
The second chapter addresses the question ‘what is Area Studies’, which is approached in three steps. First, it links the emergence of the modern area studies with the rise of the ‘national schema’ during the Cold War, where the US became a superpower perceiving the rest of the world as an array of problems that are potentially solvable by systematic, applied academic inquiry. Here, the modernization theory played a crucial role as a ‘scientific/intellectual movement’ (SIM) formative for the establishment of the area studies programs that were provided steady federal patronage for the production of social knowledge useful for US foreign policy worldwide. The chapter then shows how area studies always have been a controversial project existing at the interstices of two kinds of tensions: between the disciplinary/abstract and the regional/particular and between universities and the state. As an expression of the ‘coral reef’ logic, the chapter finally argues that the area studies project despite the decline of the modernization paradigm and its inherent tensions has had a durable impact on academia by bringing in an organization model – the center – which has had consequences for academic planning into the present.
The following three chapters zoom in on this organization model – the center – and its complex relationship with disciplines and departments. Following an account that draws on Abbott’s analysis of the emergence and evolvement of the humanistic and science disciplines in American academia and how they are inspired by but different from the German and British models, the third chapter argues that it is necessary to supplement this story with attention to the evolution of other kinds of academic units; these are going under labels such as center, institute, project or forum with the Title VI funded area studies centers as the paradigmatic example. These so-called ‘not-departments’, defined by the absence of tenure lines, doctoral programs and academic self-governance, are key mechanisms through which the universities try to promote cooperation across fields and manage an inherent tension between abstract disciplinary vs. contextually specific problems or ‘basic’ vs. ‘applied’ research valued differently by the disciplines, trustees, funding agencies and the state legislators. The following fourth chapter further explores how centers based on the so-called ‘stone soup’ principle can play an important role for enabling cross-unit cooperation: the center provides the ‘pot’ and multiple co-sponsorships from other departments and partners constitute the ‘meat’ and ‘potatoes’ for the ‘soup’. As the chapter shows, this may result in nourishing ‘soups’ with different kinds of ‘academic flavor’ across campuses. While the not-departments are important, this does not mean they have an equal status with the departments or that the relationship between the two kinds of academic units is without tension. This is explored in Chapter 5. It revisits some of the themes of the classic ‘area studies controversy’ between disciplinary and regional specific knowledge and argues that this controversy is not only still very much alive but the divide may even be growing over the years. Thus, the chapter finds that there is a widely held view in the American social sciences that studying social science phenomena as they are expressed outside of the United States, in any other way than as a generic case, will at best be a professional risk for scholars in disciplinary departments. This is attributed to the increasing primacy the disciplines are giving to abstract theoretical knowledge over particularistic regionally specific knowledge and to quantitative over qualitative methods. As a consequence, ambitious young scholars aware of the current hiring logics prioritize US centric topics and quantitative skills over those required for pursuit of particularistic inquiry abroad. The concluding sixth chapter turns to the ‘global schema’ and considers how the new era of globalization in a number of ways has been reflected in the part of American academia under scrutiny. As some of the traditional sources of funding have declined, such as Title VI that has been crucial for the area studies centers, there has not only been a search for new patrons and donors, but also attempts at attracting new tuition paying students from overseas and at the same time American universities have expanded their physical presence abroad with new satellite facilities. In parallel, the focus on regions associated with the ‘national schema’ has been replaced by a growing emphasis on movements and flows across places. As a reflection of this, centers and degree programs have increasingly been organized around broader topics rather than regional themes, e.g. ‘terrorism’, ‘environment’ or simply ‘global studies’. This leaves the professional schools, which by definition do ‘applied social science’, as one of the few remaining friendlier places to regionally focused social science in an academia where the disciplines increasingly indulge into abstractions. Against this background, the volume concludes by asking what sort of social science we want and what kind of future role American research universities should play in the larger ecology of knowledge production about other parts of the world.
For those who have followed the area studies controversy, the issues raised in this volume will as such not appear as completely novel, but the authors provide new insights and important contributions to a debate that has been going on since the 1990s discussions about whether the end of the Cold War and ‘the end of History’ also meant the end of Area Studies. Compared to some of the more recent contributions to this debate, which argue that we have been moving beyond the classic area studies controversy and see a growing cross-fertilization between generalists and regional specialists, this volume adopts a less optimist tone as it suggests that some of the basic issues of this controversy by no means have become obsolete. Just as it is not the first study on how (American) universities are making sense of the world, most likely, the volume will also not be the last one. Thus, the volume raises a number of questions that deserve further consideration in future studies. One of these concerns whether and how the growing expansion of branches or satellites of American universities outside of the United States will influence American academia’s way of ‘seeing the world’ and to what extent it is possible to draw comparisons to the experiences from the history of the American Universities of Beirut, Cairo, etc. Another question relates to how the described dynamics between departments and not-departments and between generalists and regional specialists, etc. are played in different contexts. In a very interesting comparison of how different disciplines within the social sciences relate to regional specialists and context-sensitive knowledge about places outside of the United States, Chapter 5 brings attention to differences between economists, sociologists and political scientists and argues that the latter group of scholars in comparative terms were more open-minded. It would be useful to supplement this comparison with an examination of whether the findings from this study, which has focused on regional studies at US research universities concerning the Middle East and its neighboring geographies, also apply to other areas. In general, most of the attention in these kinds of discussions has concerned the dynamics between the generalist disciplines and the area studies as such, whereas limited attention has been directed to whether experiences from, say, Middle East, African or Chinese Studies are identical or differ significantly. Another potentially interesting comparison relates to the question about whether the findings from the present study, which explicitly focuses on American academia, also apply outside of the American context? In other words, do French, German, Danish, Chinese academia produce and disseminate knowledge about other parts of the world in significantly different ways than in the United States, so that tensions in these academic contexts are not necessarily running between departments and not-departments and between disciplinary abstraction and regionally context-sensitive knowledge. So far, much of the debate on the area studies controversy relates to themes that have taken place in an American context, but maybe it is time to supplement excellent studies as the present one with similar studies on how non-American universities make knowledge in a global era.