Current conversations on the state of academia contain a broad sense of
crisis over changes in the body of university knowledge--the decline of
literature, the unbridling of ethnic studies, the growth of various
applied programs, and so on. Much of the concern revolves around a
perceived deterioration of the academic core in which, the thinking
goes, the university's teaching and research priorities are increasingly
compromised by external financial and political interests. With data on
faculty and course composition over the twentieth century for a global
sample of universities, this book provides an examination unprecedented
in scope and scale of changes in academia. The authors document the
changing emphases accorded the branches of learning, the applied and
basic divisions, and the disciplinary fields. They find deep
transformations, as anticipated, but offer a new explanation for these
shifts. Changes in academic focus are less the work of outside interest
groups, but instead are cultural maps to the altering features of
globally institutionalized understandings of reality.