Dr. Linda Williams died on Oct. 16. She had been a senior professor of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland. Before that, she had taught at Howard and other universities and had served in senior positions in most of the African American political organizations, notably the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Linda was a fighter. She battled prejudice against Blacks, women, people from tiny, poor Texas towns, activists with PhDs, and professors who spend too much time in politics. She battled stupid policies, shortsighted leaders, and very serious illness. She fought on her own behalf but mainly for her students, her community, and all oppressed people.

But to call her a fighter, while completely true, is also misleading. She was one of the very warmest, funniest, most caring, cheerful, and generous of our colleagues. The picture above captures her wry smile and her fondness for the photographer (who happens to be our mutual friend Margaret Morgan-Hubbard). The books and the punching bags in the background are perfect symbols. Linda was a careful scholar who also took swings at the powerful.

At today’s memorial service, a dozen young African American professors from across the country took the stage together. They were among Linda’s PhD students from the 1990s. She had broken down doors for them, challenged them intellectually, and given them courage. But for me the most moving testimony was about their children. It seems that in homes where a parent has studied with Linda, the children know “Dr. Williams” as a shorthand for excellence. That is an astounding legacy.

I grew up with Jason Stanley, who wrote a thoughtful post on the Leiter Report about changes in academia since our days as fellow faculty-brats. His father, Prof. Manfred Stanley (whom I knew well and miss) was committed to his institution and community, to such a point that the idea of moving “bewildered him.”

He tended to value conferences, reading groups, and the development of links between the university and the community at least as much as his own written work. … His own production clearly suffered from his other activities. For example, he spent years working with a poor town near Syracuse on a project concerning the responsibility of companies to the communities they abandon. A lot emerged from this project; a documentary, several town-meetings, and a civics class for high school students in that town. But very few publications emerged from it. He also viewed his obligations to his community as extending to his family. For example, he sent his children to Syracuse city public schools. As a professor at the local good university, he felt an extra obligation to be a member of the community, rather than a lesser obligation.

Jason believes that our “generation of academics is quite different.” We change institutions regularly, or hope to do so. We think of ourselves as “free agents,” willing to obtain better salaries, working conditions, and status by moving or threatening to move. Our communities are not composed of colleagues, let alone neighbors and fellow citizens, but specialists in our field whom we “see at conferences and talks, and chat with on e-mail and on the phone.”

I think at the deepest level what has happened is a form of Weberian rationization. (That seems a fitting theory to apply in a post that invokes Manny Stanley.) Increasingly, the whole population of college-bound students and faculty have in mind the same criteria of excellence. They rank all institutions on one great Chain of Being that has Harvard and MIT at (or near) the top, and the local community college near the bottom. Lew Friedland and Shauna Morimoto find (pdf) that all high school students in one midwestern town– including those who are struggling in school–envision the same status hierarchy and believe that their life-prospects will be determined by how high they can rise on it.

When everyone is trying to move up a single scale, certain practical consequences result. Actual, published rankings circulate and are influential. Rising in the rankings makes an institution more competitive, thus allowing it to admit better qualified students who are easier and more fun to teach. In turn, the rankings are affected by institutions’ international reputation for research. As in any Weberian system, quantifiable and generalizable criteria begin to count: e.g., the number of publications, or the rate of publication in the most competitive journals. Professors are highly aware of their institutions’ reputations and are very tempted to try to move up when possible. Hence there’s a lot of moving around. Building a local reputation (on or off campus) doesn’t increase one’s market value, so we put our energy into national publications for the people who might write us recommendation letters.

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(Pasadena) Sometimes I find it strange that we pay scholars to teach young people. Scholarship and teaching are often such different affairs. A society could employ scholars to conduct research and teach apprentice scholars but never expect them to come into contact with regular undergraduates.

However, last weekend, I found myself at an academic conference session that reminded me why it’s important for researchers also to teach. It was a very strong panel of pyschologists who study adolescents’ engagement in school (not their civic engagement; their commitment to academic work). That’s an important subject, because kids who are disengaged tend to drop out of school and then pay a very serious price for the rest of their lives. The presentations described rigorous and relevant research. I had a somewhat detached perspective on the whole business, because I’ve never even taken a psychology course; I had few preconceptions or opinions about “scree charts,” “eigenvalues,” and “confirmatory factor analysis”–the topics of the discussion. It occurred to me that when social science works well, matters of great public importance are divided up into chunks that can be addressed through rigorous, cumulative research. Scholars build on previous work and use the most advanced available tools on manageable questions. Everyday presentations and discussions within the discipline tend to be narrow and technical. All of that is fine–as long as the whole enterprise moves toward important general conclusions. Thus it’s valuable for specialists to have to present their whole subject to novices who want to know why it matters. I watched last weekend’s presenters talk about factor-analysis with their colleagues from around the country and imagined them also lecturing to undergraduates about American education. It seemed to be just the right combination.