had cause to look up some stuff on professionalization from my files, citing some work by Thomas Haskell. This review is of a book that details the rise of the professionalization you're talking about. Made me chuckle, the bit in there about Harvard students going on a rampage when the first introduced required exams in the transition to the "new" university. From "Power to the Experts" by Thomas Haskell:
"Bledstein concentrates on the men who presided over the creation of the modern American university, for it served as nursery for all the major professions. In addition to the three most famous university presidents, Eliot, Gilman, and White, he also discusses James McCosh of Princeton, Noah Porter of Yale, Frederick A.P. Barnard of Columbia, and Presidents Angell, Bascom, and Folwell of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota respectively. These men were the ideologues of professionalism. In fact, what we have been calling the "culture of professionalism" is in essence little more than the utopian vision of a meritocratic society run by university graduates that these men projected in order to win support from prospective patrons, legislators, and popular audiences.
The Victorian university presidents remembered with special horror their own experiences as students in the "oldtime colleges" before the Civil War. It was not only dull recitations and a stale curriculum that they were reacting against as they embarked on their movement to reform higher education; Andrew Dickson White also recalled
The student brawl at the Harvard commons which cost the historian Prescott his sight, and the riot at the Harvard commencement which blocked the way of President Everett and the British minister the fatal wounding of Tutor Dwight, the maiming of Tutor Goodrich, and the killing of two town rioters by students at Yale the monstrous indignities to the president and faculty at Hobart of which I was myself a witness, as well as the state of things at various other colleges in my own college days.
Pandemonium swept through American college campuses time after time during the early decades of the nineteenth century and Bledstein sees in this puzzling phenomenon telling evidence of a disjunction between the needs of the first generation of middle-class students and the strained capacities of institutions attuned to an older social order.
The old colleges offended the new class both by the unfocused, impractical character of the education they offered and also by their reliance on an external, authoritarian mode of discipline, erratically enforced. In contrast, the new university succeeded by taking advantage of the student's "vertical vision." It played on his ambition, grouped him exclusively with students of his own age, subjected him to regular tests, and reported his class standing or grade average to his parents at stated intervals. These devices had not been common in the old colleges. In 1790 when Harvard tried to introduce a required examination, students went on a rampage that emptied the examination room. Students became docile and took higher education seriously in the closing decades of the nineteenth century because by then they saw the college years as a vital stage in the most desirable careers. This was the student's prime opportunity to discipline himself for the competitive trials ahead, sharpen his mind, conquer laziness, learn to be patient.
Most important, the variety and rigor of the university experience helped the young person identify his special "strengths"which is to say, the experience helped him decide within which career he might expect to rise highest. Again Bledstein believes that Emerson (who was enormously popular among college students) articulated the guiding thought: "Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and this makes him necessary to society." Therefore, "each is bound to discover what his faculty is, to develop it, and to use it for the benefit of mankind." A similar dictum was put forward in France by Emile Durkheim in grimmer and more revealing language: "The categorical imperative of the moral conscience is assuming the following form: Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function."<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/oct/13/power-to-the-experts/?page=2#fn4-362418625>4
Bledstein's analysis thus substitutes the university for the Chamber of Commerce as the representative institution of bourgeois society, and self-esteem for profits as the driving force of modern historical development. These curious twists become especially clear near the end of his book when he contrasts his view of the university to Thorstein Veblen's. Veblen attributed the failings of the American university to the corrupting influence of the industrial tycoons who held it in trust and the businesslike "captains of erudition" who administered it. Their sin was to market education like a commodity and to judge scholarship by its cash value.
Bledstein puts the matter in a different light by erasing the line that Veblen drew between cynical business practices and high-minded professional ones. In his view the tragic flaw of the American university is not the commercialism that seeps in from outside, but the professionalism that is deliberately cultivated within. "On the basis of the present study," says Bledstein, "it would surely seem obvious that Veblen and his followers grossly overestimated the idealistic disinterestedness of professional behavior in American life, including that of the 'scholarly' American professor . Neither praise nor blame for the direction of higher education in America can be leveled at the traditional villain, the business community . No, a far more powerful element is at work here. From the beginning the ego-satisfying pretensions of professionalism have been closer to the heart of the middle-class American than the raw profits of capitalism."
It is easy, and not inaccurate, to complain that this book is one-sided. Bledstein shows little interest in the genuine benefits professionalism sometimes has brought, and he never seriously considers what it would mean for us today to try to do without professional experts. His animus against things professional is so sweeping that it leads him to the brink of hypocrisy. One cannot help wondering what undisclosed loophole permits this professional teacher and historian to escape from his own strictures against the innately parasitic and self-inflating ways of professional people. The work of lawyers, physicians, engineers, and architects can hardly be any more egotistical than "giving" lectures or writing books. In fact, if a reader were to take Bledstein's very severe ethical standpoint to heart, there would be nothing to prevent him from condemning The Culture of Professionalism as a self-serving display of scholarly virtuosity, designed, all too obviously, to advance its author's professional career. To do so would be most unfair, but for reasons that Bledstein is loathe to examine.
On the other hand, the existing literature on the rise of the university and the "achievement of professional standards" in various fields is larded with self-congratulation; by stressing the costs of professionalization Bledstein may help to right the balance, even though he does not tell the whole story. Who among us does not know someone who is too professional? In every field one finds people obsessed with the pursuit of arcane professional honors, intolerant of all disciplines but their own, cut off by their expertise from basic human interests and sympathies, or perhaps even intellectually crippled by premature loyalty to the doctrines of an overpowering mentor. The costs of professionalism have been real and Bledstein exposes them brilliantly.
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/oct/13/power-to-the-experts/?pagination=false>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/oct/13/power-to-the-experts/?pagination=false