Forces in tension: The state, civil society and market in the future of the university

Abstract

The year 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Clark Kerr's Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, published in the first edition of his influential work, The Uses of the University (Kerr 1963). Then president of the University of California system, Kerr set out a remarkably thorough and prescient vision of the research university, its challenges and its potentials. While in subsequent editions Kerr offered new perspectives on a number of functions and adjusted some of his priorities, he remained convinced of the need for a better understanding of the political life of the university, and the ways in which it would be shaped by powerful internal and external forces. In delivering the original lectures in 1963, Kerr noted, "Beyond the formal structure of power, as lodged in students, faculty, administration or 'public' instrumentalities, lie the sources of informal influence. The American system is particularly sensitive to its many particular publics" (2001, p. 20). In a 2001 addendum, he added urgency to his claim: "The most critical pressures will be on those who handle the flow of transactions between universities and the external society's power centers. Will they know enough, care enough, be vested with sufficient high-level, long-term judgment to manage the flow effectively?" (Kerr 2001, p. 225).