Overview

"Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the ""Protestant Ethic"" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of ""lecturing with applause"" and ""publish or perish,"" and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic."

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9780226109220

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Reviews

In almost any way that one can imagine, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is an astonishing book.... Many times the prose is purposefully funny and anything but dry-as-dust academic writing. No summary can do justice to a book so relentless in analysis and so rich in original source material.... This is a brilliant book. The styles and methods may be recognizable, but the whole is daringly new, exciting, and disturbing. - Sheldon Rothblatt, American Scientist [Clark] makes his case with analytic shrewdness, an exuberant love of archival anecdote, and a wry sense of humor. It's hard to resist a writer who begins by noting, 'Befitting the subject, this is an odd book.' - Anthony Grafton, New Yorker

Author Information

William Clark is visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coeditor of The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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