Abstract
‘Academic drift’ is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in several countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Understanding drift is obviously important, both to practitioners concerned that higher education should be relevant to practice, but also to historians who seek to make sense of long-term trends in knowledge-production. It is surprising, therefore, that although the existence of drift has been widely documented, remarkably little attention has been given so far to explaining it. In this paper I argue that drift is not an invariant universal tendency but a historically specific one which arises under particular circumstances. I outline a model of institutional dynamics which seeks to explain why drift has occurred at some institutions but not others. In the second section I explore the implications of the model for educationists and policy-makers concerned with the reform of higher education in these areas.
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Notes
It is worth emphasising that when I describe an approach to problem-solving as ‘scientific’, I do not mean that the staff in question were necessarily uninterested in practical problems. On the contrary, many were, but the point is that they regarded science as by far the most important element in the solution to such problems. Conversely, when I describe an orientation as ‘practical’, I do not mean that such staff were either ignorant of, or made no use of theories, laws, concepts etc. from the basic sciences. Instead, they regarded these disciplines as just one resource among many for the solution of practical problems (much in the manner of the design engineer).
As the term ‘field’ suggests, the model was loosely inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. Bourdieu 1993).
Sturdy, ‘Looking for trouble: medical science and clinical practice in the historiography of modern medicine’, Social History of Medicine, forthcoming.
It is interesting in this regard to note Hightower’s recommendations for the reform of American agricultural research (Hightower 1973, chp. 9). Many of them are pitched at the level of national policy- making (e.g. public inquiries, congressional committees) while relatively few concern the structure of agricultural institutions or the higher education system more generally. Nothing is said, for example, about changing the reward systems or research-funding arrangements for agricultural scientists, nor about restructuring the extension service so as to give it more influence upon research agendas.
Bloor, The Enigma of the Aerofoil, 1909-1930: Rival Theories in Aerodynamics. A Sociological and Historical Study of a Scientific Dispute (forthcoming); cf. Sanderson (1972).
There is some evidence that this has already occurred (Locke 1989, pp.174–175), and in Britain something similar seems to have happened at comparable institutions (the polytechnic colleges) between their creation in the 1960s and their upgrading to universities in 1992.
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I thank David Bloor for helpful criticism of this paper in draft form.
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Harwood, J. Understanding Academic Drift: On the Institutional Dynamics of Higher Technical and Professional Education. Minerva 48, 413–427 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-010-9156-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-010-9156-9