Gumport, Patricia J., ed. Sociology of Higher Education: Contributions and Their Contexts.

• Author: Hartwig, Richard E.
• Position: Book review

Gumport, Patricia J., ed. Sociology of Higher Education: Contributions and Their Contexts. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xii + 382 pp. Cloth, $50; paper, $25.

This work has something of the feeling of an in-house Festschrift (a book that pays tribute to an accomplished scholar). The individual effectively being honored is Burton Clark, probably the world's most outstanding analyst of higher education. Clark is now professor emeritus of higher education and sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles. Nine of the fifteen contributors to this volume have Stanford Ph.D.'s or are degree candidates at Stanford. Four have taught at Stanford and another four at UCLA. (Clark taught at both institutions as well as Harvard, Yale, and UC-Berkeley.) Most of the contributors are professors of education or higher education--some with sociology degrees. The rest are sociologists who study higher education. The book begins with a reprint of Clark's "Development of the Sociology of Higher Education" (originally published in Sociology of Education 46 (Winter 1973):2-14). In the concluding section, written in 2006, Clark revisits his classic assessment of the field in a brief "Note on Pursuing Things That Work."

Editor and contributor Patricia J. Gumport explains that there has been no comprehensive attempt to assess the field of sociology of higher education since Clark's seminal article. This is the formal objective of the book, which includes schematic and bibliographic essays on the main specializations which have developed in the field: inequality, impact of college on students, the study of the academic profession per se, and colleges and universities as institutions. Emerging lines of inquiry include higher education as an institution, sociological studies of academic departments, the sociology of diversity, and sociological frameworks for higher-education-policy research. This sounds dull, but the work is of great importance to scholars working in the field. It gives them the big picture, namely, what has been done and what is left to do. None of the contributors argues that too much has been written in any particular area. However, Clark is unhappy with the present state of the field. He sees an acute...