ABSTRACT
Happily the most objective statement author can make is also the one that provides the best basis for explaining the changes that seem to author to have occurred among academics in this country during the last ten years. The largest group of academics is made up not of humanists or social scientists or pure scientists, but of those whose disciplines – law, medicine and engineering. Public opinion approved – chiefly because it had allowed itself to be persuaded that only more and bigger universities could supply the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for economic growth and indeed for national survival itself. The advancement of knowledge implies – perhaps not necessarily, but as it is usually understood – its fragmentation, invites narrower concentration; and both the fragmentation and the concentration have been facilitated by the recent rapid growth in the size and resources of departments.
