Misgivings pervade current discourse on the university's academic priorities--the decline of literature, the rise of racial and ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies, the explosion of business programs, and so on. Much of the concern revolves around a perceived corruption of the academic core by financial, political, and social interests outside the university.

With worldwide data on the university's faculty and course composition over the twentieth century, Frank and Gabler document broad changes in teaching and research emphases. As anticipated, there are fundamental transformations, including a sharp decline in the prominence of the humanities and a rapid rise in the priority of the social sciences. In aggregate, however, the changes look less like the handiwork of external interests than maps of the changing features of globally institutionalized "reality."