The 2012 CLARK KERR LECTURES
Lecture 3: Contemporary Trends: Diagnoses and Conditional Predictions

The third lecture turns to the present and future. The lecturer initially sketches a """"perfect storm"""": a confluence of adverse economic, political, and institutional changes that, to many, spell revolutionary transformation if not doom for higher education. In the remainder he assesses the most salient of these changes in the context of what our institutions of higher education have become. The selected themes are (a) budgetary starvation, imposition of accountability, loss of autonomy, and resulting paradoxes of governance; (b) the """"corporatization"""" of academic life, including the language and culture of managerialism, consumerism, the economizing imperative, and university-industry cooperation; (c) on-line distance instruction and the rise of for-profits; and (d) the spectacular growth of non-tenure-track and part-time faculty, with its implications for academic tenure and academic freedom.
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The lecture series was established in 2001 under the auspices of the Center for Studies in Higher Education on the Berkeley campus. Initial funding for the lectures was provided by the University of California's Office of the President, and subsequently major complementary funding has been received from the Carnegie Corporation. The Center for Studies in Higher Education has established an agreement with the University of California Press for publication of the second and future lectures.

The 2012 Clark Kerr lecturer will be Neil Smelser, one of the most distinguished and accomplished leaders of American Higher Education and recognized as a profound observer of higher education. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1958 and has authored eighteen books, including "Theory of Collective Behavior". He is a University Professor Emeritus of Sociology for the University of California. His distinguished career has been entirely at the Berkeley campus except for a period in which he was Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His research has focused on what he calls the """"macroscopic social structural level"""" of social life, including economic sociology, social change, social movements, and the sociology of education. He is also a trained psychoanalyst. His most recent book, published by the University of California Press in 2010, is "Reflections on the University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University". Smelser is a former president of the American Sociological Association, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Professor Smelser's three lectures in the series will be given January 24th and 31st, and February 7th, 2012, on the Berkeley campus, with the third lecture also being given February 14th on the Riverside campus. His subject is "Higher Education: The Play of Continuity and Crisis." In the lectures he will present a general view of social change, especially in universities, and interpret contemporary problems, controversies, and enigmas.
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