Academic Profession in Academic Organization

An analysis of the properties of university organization will tell us about important aspects of academic life, but only an analysis of the academic profession will give us the whole story of academic work. External and internal life in academia is a function of the interplay between academic organization and academic man(woman). It is vital to an understanding of academic life to recognize the distinction in perspective between the organization and the individual, because academic organization is mainly passive whereas academic man(woman) is active. The two entities—the university and the academic profession—are fundamentally dissimilar from an action perspective. What academic man(woman) is—rational, evaluative, coordinating, goal oriented—the university cannot be; and what the university as an organization amounts to—satisfying a "garbage-can" model's properties—would spell disaster for academic man(woman). What unites the university and the academic profession is that both entities have to act in an environment that is at the same time dynamic and heterogeneous. Both the university organization and the academic profession face an environment the distinctive trait of which is a constantly shifting heterogeneity. The university may attempt to define and erect stable input and output functions vis-à-vis its environment only to discover that plans have to be remade and decisions adjusted to the ongoing march of events, which the university can neither control nor even adequately predict. What creates a hazardous situation for the university as an organization is what academic man(woman) thrives on; since the perspective of the academic profession is the understanding of the environment and not the accomplishment of organizational goals, adaptation becomes that much easier; a stable and homogeneous environment would mean that the flow of stimuli for new knowledge would slow down and there would not be such a variety of needs for research. What separates the two entities—the university and the academic profession—is the basic difference in the conditions for action.