The Natural Sciences in the University: Change and Variation over the 20th Century

The changing academic priorities of universities are often discussed but little investigated by social scientists: What accounts for the striking expansions and contractions in disciplinary fields over time? Focusing specifically on the natural sciences, this article articulates a global-institutional argument that holds that deep shifts in ontological conceptions of action and structure over the course of the 20th century fomented shifts in the teaching and research emphases of universities worldwide. Specifically, it hypothesizes that scientific fields that are premised on fixed categories and hierarchies of entities (for example, zoology) declined relative to fields that are premised on dynamic, horizontal networks of entities (for example, physics). In addition, it hypothesizes that as globally institutionalized reality shifted in favor of human, rather than divine, actorhood, fields that position their practitioners as active investigators in a dynamic universe gained ascendance over those that position practitioners as passive observers of a divinely ordered universe. Using data on worldwide faculty composition from 1915 to 1995, the authors found that these shifts indeed transpired--the fixed-categorical fields of astronomy, botany, and zoology declined precipitously, while the dynamic-network fields of geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics performed much more robustly.