In Oakeshott's "The Idea of a University" (1950), he writes that the members of a university "are not spread about the world, meeting occasionally or not at all; they live in permanent proximity to one another. And consequently we should neglect part of the character of a university if we omitted to think of it as a place." I used to not think about that very deeply, but I believe it is relevant to what you are saying here: the increasing mobility of senior university administrators, combined with the idea that there are management strategies that apply to any institution where they might land, has led to the neglect of local knowledge, through the assumption that one campus is much the same as another (this has had dreadful consequences for my own university). What I think Oakeshott means by "place" is not so much the real estate as the "permanent proximity" of faculty, and the mutual understandings that come from that. Of course new voices are always needed. But they are joining what had been an ongoing conversation.
A little of this is what Scott meant in Seeing Like a State by "legibility": that the modern state and modern institutions seek to make the governed 'legible' often by making them the same from site to site, that they are opposed to locality, to particularity. But then a fair amount of social science lines up behind that goal too--that to encompass the subjects of their analysis, they have to reduce them to a common denominator (and then forget that they did so).
Another great essay.
In Oakeshott's "The Idea of a University" (1950), he writes that the members of a university "are not spread about the world, meeting occasionally or not at all; they live in permanent proximity to one another. And consequently we should neglect part of the character of a university if we omitted to think of it as a place." I used to not think about that very deeply, but I believe it is relevant to what you are saying here: the increasing mobility of senior university administrators, combined with the idea that there are management strategies that apply to any institution where they might land, has led to the neglect of local knowledge, through the assumption that one campus is much the same as another (this has had dreadful consequences for my own university). What I think Oakeshott means by "place" is not so much the real estate as the "permanent proximity" of faculty, and the mutual understandings that come from that. Of course new voices are always needed. But they are joining what had been an ongoing conversation.
A little of this is what Scott meant in Seeing Like a State by "legibility": that the modern state and modern institutions seek to make the governed 'legible' often by making them the same from site to site, that they are opposed to locality, to particularity. But then a fair amount of social science lines up behind that goal too--that to encompass the subjects of their analysis, they have to reduce them to a common denominator (and then forget that they did so).