105 Book R e v i e w s / C o m p t e s R e n d u s tive feature of Queen's was that, under the influence of McNeill, and in pursuit of financial security, university policy and administration made bad times worse' (p. 271). Ironically, it was McNeill who provided that his tombstone should bear Tennyson's words: 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not t o yield', and thus supplied the title of the first volume of the Queen's history. Alive or dead, for good and ill, W.E. McNeill was very much part of the university's tradition. One of the best chapters in the book is the account of Queen's during the Cold War, and the way in which the university reacted to attacks upon two very different colleagues accused of communist sympathies. In one case, the charge was of treasonable disclosure of military secrets. Because the university obviously meant to treat both men with equity and to safeguard their personal liberties with equal justice, but inadvertently ended up treating one man fairly and the other man repressively and stultifyingly, the chapter raises profound questions about the conflict of academic freedom and institutional loyalties. One could have wished that Professor Gibson might have probed those issues rather more deeply. This second volume of the history covers the years 1917-1961 .Why the author stopped short of the stimulating Corry years, when all universities expanded the frontiers of their minds, and why he did not tell the story of the years of student unrest, when all universities were in turmoil, we are not informed. There are many stories of student rowdiness and hooliganism; one is almost tempted to wonder whether the student revolt of the sixties was not so noticeable at Queen's as at other more sober institutions. It may be that Professor Gibson intends to write a third volume. Professor Gibson's book is, as one would have expected of him, meticulous in its scholarship, broad-minded in its interests, easy and unobtrusive in its language. The illustrations are well chosen, and the McGill-Queen's Press is to be congratulated on the appearance and style of the volume. Queen's has every reason to be proud of its new history. Stanley B. Frost McGill University Burton R. Clark, The Higher Education System; Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 315 Pages The purpose of this book is to "set forth the basic elements of the higher education system, as seen from an organizational perspective; and to show how those features vary across nations, with fateful effects". The elements used to accomplish this purpose are work, belief, and authority while the nations (in order of index references) are principally the United States, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Sweden. The selection of the nations is based upon the places "where the best research has been 106 B o o k R e v i e w s / C o m p t e s R e n d u s d o n e " not on population or land area with the result that the countries of Russia, China, Canada and Mexico and the continents of South America, Australia and Africa combined receive less attention than the United States alone. This basis for selection is made in spite of the author's own warning against the "homet o w n " view of most American writers on higher education and the author's stated view that "the U.S. system, in its fundaments, is a deviant case." The reader spends many pages with that deviant case. The organization of the book follows the purpose, expands the basic elements to include the substance of higher education which is knowledge, relates these basic elements to integration and change, and uses a normative theory of values and preferences to unite the academic organizational structure in this crossnational perspective. The author's stated propositions underlying his key idea of interest are: "The division of labor in the academic world, as elsewhere, is a division of human commitment. The work commitments have related orientations. Commitment and orientation, work and belief, compose interests, a composite of the material and the ideal. The interest groups that are thereby generated attach authority to themselves and seek modes of integration that are congenial. In turn, the powered structure of interests becomes the primary determinant of change in the system. It also determines to a considerable degree how, and how much, the system comes to express certain broad social values." The evidence brought to these propositions is found in the research literature of the principal, and other, nations selected for this study. The reader encounters few primary sources of data, no tables, few diagrams and an incomplete treatment of a given topic across the principal nations selected. The reader must rely upon the author's selection- of other works as evidence for the author's contentions. The book is at its best in chapter five (integration) where the author accomplishes his purposes by ordering various parts, constructing a model for comparing natiorfal systems, and draws upon several national systems to support his main propositions about interest. The following excerpt captures his cross-national perspective in action. "Hardening of Internal Interests." Much of the more obvious politicization of higher education in recent decades has involved the representation of internal interests. More groups have clamored for "participation" in decision making, across the many levels from the operating units to the top. In the expanded contest, the methods of representation have moved from the informal to the formal, from the soft to the hard. This participation phenomenon, sometimes also referred to as democratization, occurred most sharply, in Western European systems, in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Junior faculty, students and such nonacademic personnel as custodians sought a piece of the power long monopolized by senior professors and state bureaucrats in the European mode of authority distribution described in Chapter 4. They demanded, and often got, a formal allotment of seats and voting rights in various bodies. Noted changes occurred in West Germany and Denmark, where, in certain areas of decision, such as course formation, the votes 107 Book R e v i e w s / C o m p t e s R e n d u s of senior professors were reduced to one-third of the total, in a Drittelparitat ( 1 / 3 - 1 / 3 - 1 / 3 ) distribution of votes among senior faculty, junior faculty, and students. The allocations in West Germany varied from one Land to another, and were often different according to decision area; e.g., more votes were reserved to senior faculty in matters of research, more influence given to the new groups in arranging the curriculum. Notably, the formal recognition of the representation of a larger set of interest groups were enacted by legislation and hence written into law. It thereby became formalized by codification as well as explication, to the extent that the judiciary became involved in interpreting the appropriateness and application of the law. Thus, a 1973 court decision in West Germany that applied throughout the country "rolled back" some of the liberal distribution of votes affected in earlier legislation. The court decided that senior professors had certain inherent rights that should be reflected in predominant power — half of the votes or more — in such matters as research and appointments. Thus it went in varying degrees in, for example, Austria, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. The main idea throughout was simultaneously to reduce the power of senior faculty and abate the discontent of the other internal segments. The reader will encounter some clear insights, spiced with wit, into the academic world. Who cannot find himself or herself in the following description? "The associations, learned societies, and academies that disciplines and professional areas develop generate a steady flow of symbolic materials about themselves. The materials include: admission and membership requirements that help distinguish between insiders and outsiders; reaffirmations of the special virtues of the field; reports on how the field as a whole is doing, particularly if it is engaged in delicate relations, or even border warfare, with other fields; prizes and tributes for outstanding performers and "tribal elders"; sometimes a code of ethics; and always an obituary column, the repetitive honor paid to surviving colleagues as well as the deceased. From such materials, and associated activities and rewards, come self-identities that may be more powerful than those of mate, lover, and family protector, or those that come from community, political party, church, and fraternal order. As the professor comes to care about the welfare of his discipline or profession as well as the advancement of his own work, there is less reason to go home at five o'clock." The weaknesses of the book reflect the immature state of the art and the incompleteness of the international literature in higher education. One way to overcome these weaknesses is to collect new data and to analyze it as Lyman Glenny did in his "Funding Higher Education: A Six Nation Analysis" in 1979. The other is to take Clark's approach, to rely upon the existing studies of higher education, and to try to organize them into some system which helps the reader to see relationships among national systems. The specific value of this book may well be for someone who plans a sabbatical leave and wants to spend some time in the principal nations selected for this study. It would serve as a useful guide to some of the differences and similarities the traveler finds when trying to relate another system to his or her own. It 108 Book R e v i e w s / C o m p t e s R e n d u s would also be a useful framework for organizing an international conference on higher education which would allow people to share their own research and to relate it to the research of other nations. For the scholar of higher education, unless very familiar with the American system of higher education, many of the references and examples in the book may have little meaning. How many people outside the U.S.A., or inside for that matter, can evaluate the following statement? "Thus, a saga may freeze commitments. But the contents of sagas make a difference in the degree of rigidity. For example, the traditional self-belief of Antioch College developed in the 1920's and 1930's was more open to experimentation and structural change than that of Reed, since it encouraged such nontraditional perspectives and programs as a work-study program and intense student participation in campus government." Many other references have to do with the California state system and again the reader would have to be familiar with details of that system for the examples to be clear. The book, at its best, provides a new light for examining our present views of our system of higher education. The frustration felt by the reader, and perhaps the author as well, is born out of the use of certain examples to support certain points without having the full set of examples from which to draw one's own conclusions. Perhaps as the international literature of higher education matures, as more research is developed around the themes the author has suggested, and as more original data is prepared and analyzed, a better documented picture will emerge for us all. F. Craig Johnson The Florida State University