ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, American colleges were conceived and operated as pillars of the locally established church, political order, and social conventions. National and regional meetings for each academic discipline and subdiscipline are now annual affairs, national journals publish work in every specialized subject, and an informal national system of job placement and replacement has come into existence. The "managerial revolution," while not so widespread, so complete, or so progressive as some of its prophets have suggested, has taken place in many non-academic enterprises. The faculty has also sought to apply to the selection of undergraduates the same meritocratic standards that have long been used to select graduate students. The redistribution of power in the universities has been accompanied—and to some extent caused—by a change in the relationship between the university and other established institutions. Virtually all terminal colleges want to hire faculty of the kind now hired by the university colleges.
