ABSTRACT

The role issues are clearer. After all, the overwhelming majority of lawyers and physicians are nonacademic, and few organizations in modern society are more potent and more prestige-conferring than the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association. But in many other academic fields the tensions are great because of the relative recency of the change. These are the structural changes that, any others can easily think of, lie behind present conflicts of academic role and loyalty. The major cause of present difficulties—of conflicts in academic role and loyalty that sometimes threaten to drive the university's historic and still essential functions underground—is not, therefore, the mere fact of the university's taking on the operational problems of society. The difference between academic and nonacademic on the campus becomes ever more tenuous under the spur of professionalization of field and of a Faustian conception of the university.