Universities: Basic Interest and Legitimate Authority

Program year: 1994/1995Digitized from print original stored in HDRThe purpose of this paper is to explore how universities react to outside pressures that threaten their basic interests. Two issues are central to this paper. First is identifying the basic interests of universities and how they are interrelated. Second is identifying when universities' reactions to outside pressures either increase or decrease their legitimacy as institutions. Two events that brought the issue of university legitimacy to the foreground are analyzed: the McCarthy era and the student movement of the sixties. In addition to analyzing these events, I present a framework for examining university behavior. While this framework may seem technical and in some instances too abstract to draw significant distinctions, it offers a basis for comparison beyond participants' and observers' opinions. Often those who study the two events have based their analysis on their own opinions. If an observer believes that the McCarthy investigations were evil, for instance, he or she tends to portray every action taken by investigations to comply with McCarthy committees to be illegitimate. By contrast, the framework presented here offers a more neutral way of establishing when universities legitimately exercise their authority. Using this framework, different observers should make similar conclusions regardless of their personal opinions. Indeed, by comparing how universities have reacted to these two different sets of events, I hope to demonstrate that this framework can be applied without personal bias