Conformity : standards and change in higher education /
Martin, Warren Bryan
- FIRST EDITION
- San Francisco, California : Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, c1969
- xxii, 264 pages ; 23 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Ideology, organization, and innovation -- II. Eight diverse schools -- III. Institutional character study -- IV. Educational philosophy and institutional goals -- V. Conventional standard of excellence -- VI. Change, innovation, experimentation -- VII. Faculty: the different and the like -- VIII. Beyond conformity.
The biblical admonition, "Beware when all men speak well of you" need not be applied to educational researchers. They have never had the privilege of being threatened by universal adulation. The biological and physical scientists may require such a warning, but seven decades of educational research have produced an impressive mass of data matched only by the complaints raised against it. When Guy T. Buswell, T. R. McConnell, Ann Heiss, and Dorothy Knoell of the Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, presented their report of 1966 entitled "Training for Educational Research," they began by stating certain problems in educational research that are the basis for persistent criticisms of the field. Research, they said, is often "fragmentary and small-scale," "of relatively unimaginative and uncomplicated design," and "the climate which nurtures research has too often been missing.