Clark, William 1953-

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Clark, William 1953-

PERSONAL:

Born December 1, 1953. Education: Reed College, B.A., 1976; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 1980, Ph.D., 1986.

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, lecturer.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer) The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.

(Editor, with Peter Becker) Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2001.

Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

A lecturer at England's Cambridge University, William Clark is the author or editor of several titles dealing with the Enlightenment and the history of the academic setting and its freedoms. In 2006 he published Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, an exploration of "the academic mystique," according to W. Bruce Leslie, writing in History: Review of New Books. Leslie further noted that Clark "examines in minute detail … the emergence of the academic culture that most of us absorb in graduate school as our identity and value system." Clark argues initially about the very roots of the research university, contending that it was not, as is popularly accepted, the result of reforms put into place following the Napoleonic era. Instead, Clark attempts to demonstrate that the German model of the research university was already in place by 1789, prior to the advent of Napoleon. Also, Clark shows how, by 1789, academics had been granted a certain celebrity status. Thus, the language scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is usually given credit as the "initiator of a new type of university [was actually] the author of an intellectual rationale for what already existed," as Leslie noted. The same reviewer found Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University both "ambitious" and "impressive."