ABSTRACT
When considered in a comparative perspective, one of the most obvious features of the American higher education system is the steepness of the prestige gradient that distinguishes the leading institutions from the lower ranked. But this obvious vertical differentiation often masks another striking feature of the American university system, namely its horizontal differentiation: the remarkable variety of institutional types and the ease with which academic boundaries-boundaries between fields, disciplines, types, and classes of institutions-are navigated, permeated, and crossed. Where other countries have created classifications and categories to separate different parts of the higher education enterprise and then erected high walls around those classifications,1 the American system emphasizes fluidity and permeability. Where in other countries institutions are sorted into a myriad of categories like pure and applied (as in the German distinction between universities and Fachhochschulen [schools of applied science]), discipline and profession, or research and service, in the United States we find that these distinctions both exist and are, in practice, taken rather lightly. One finds law school professors writing influential philosophy, members of English departments publishing analyses of economic globalization, economics professors teaching in business schools, and business school professors making widely read contributions to psychology. On occasion, one even finds sitting judges pioneering economic theory and analysis. Likewise, future chemists, historians, or psychologists may be educated under the same institutional roof, alongside lawyers, business managers, teachers, or nurses. Undergraduate students freely explore a range of academic disciplines before settling on one. Their graduate degree may be in a field bearing little obvious connection to their undergraduate studies. Ever since business schools successfully challenged the presumed superiority of disinterested and pure science as articulated in German Wissenschaft, other schools of professional education (public health, social welfare, public administration, nursing, divinity, dentistry) or applied research (veterinarian science, forestry, or nanotechnology) followed-all operating within the fold of the same institution.
