Time and Stratification in Higher Education: The Making of Institutional Time as a Strategic Resource

In the late 19th century, John D. Rockefeller asked the then president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, what it would take to found a Harvard equivalent. The answer was: 50 million dollars and 200 years. While this anecdote is most likely not true, it proliferates through the higher education community as an indication of what a university needs to do to become “world class” (cf. Salmi 2009: 36): money progressed through a linear timeframe of 200 years. The anecdote is interesting, less because such a simple strategy might be successful, but in the way time is framed: as a linear anticipation of historical duration. If times do not change, money amplifies the standing of a university. Time here is the external threat to stratification. Such a perspective sets aside a crucial aspect of time in higher education: higher education today is first and foremost a time project. Educational regulation constructs and relies on specific time frames that make the educational progression of students visible and possible. The university hereby runs on its own time: a time that is co-constructed from within the university and impacts heavily on its environment. Depending on both the institutional time of a university and the way it is operating with its environment this time can function as a strategic resource. A specific timescale can align or diverge from other institutions and thereby institute different ways in which students and academics are progressed through the university. Time is not just external to stratification but can become its building block. In order to clarify this relationship of time and stratification the paper outlines the historical trajectory that has allowed universities to institute their own timescales: semesters, terms, quarters, credit hours and points. It confines to those countries that played a central role in the development of such timescales: the U.S., England and Germany. The paper argues that institutional time has changed with its environment. The institutionalization of academia’s own time followed five phases: sequencing, disciplining, organizing, and optimizing of academic timescales. Moving from ecclesial rule to statehood and lately to organizational competition the time on which universities operate have become more and more strategized. Only in the late 19th century and quite differently across the globe did specific timescales became a resource for stratification. By drawing on the university’s long history the paper shows that the strategizing of academic time is not just a result of current reforms but path dependent on a long and winding institutionalization process of university time.