Quote of the day: about faculty and universities

I suppose back-to-school has gotten me thinking a lot about higher education!
The following quote is a beauty:

the radical ambiguity of a profession in which one is hired for one purpose, expected to carry out another, and prized for achieving a third: teaching, research, and prestige are independent variables, besides being incommensurable per se. The upshot is as lively a set of anxieties for the agents and the responsible heads of the institution as one could hope to produce by teasing hamsters in electrified cages. Hence the peculiar governance and subdued restlessness of the American university.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement, you might all the more be impressed that the quote is from "The Academic Marketplace,  a 1958 treatise on scholarly prestige by the sociologists Theodore Caplow and Reese McGee."

Yes, prestige is a strange beast.  And it was prestige, or the perceived lack of, that triggered a lot of commotion on campus during the dog days of summer :)  The passing of fifty years means that the more things change, the more they do feel the same!