Sheila Croucher studies nations and nationalism. She sees strong parallels between "academic disciplines and departments in universities, on the one hand, and modern nation-states in the international system, on the other," and writes in this essay about how consideration of those parallels might be helpful in making institutional change happen. This thought-provoking piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education is a must-read. Unfortunately, you may find that you need either a subscription or to purchase a day pass to get at the entirety of it.

No blood has been or, one hopes, will be shed over questions of university restructuring. Still, some of the discourse about disciplinary identity and departmental belonging—how they might be threatened by possible institutional change, and why both must be preserved at all costs—can sound primordial. We know, even more clearly than we do with nations, that academic disciplines and departments are inventions. They have been constructed in specific historical contexts and shaped by specific sociopolitical, economic, and institutional circumstances.

But we also know, as with nation-states, that many people care deeply about their disciplinary identities and departmental belonging, and that many of the leaders of what we might call "academic nation-states" will endeavor to protect and promote their constituencies—often appropriately so. At my institution, the College of Arts and Science is engaging in a process of restructuring, and in the early weeks of our discussions, fear seemed rampant. Smaller departments hunkered down, anticipating annexation by larger ones with allegedly imperial ambitions, and some chairs heroically proclaimed their commitment to defend the borders of the department of X. Even departments with histories of dysfunction were loath to explore the possibility of reorganization. Some chairs and faculty members assumed that departmental reorganization would lead to the dissolution of disciplines. Others offered ideas for innovative curricular or pedagogical change, but those ideas typically resided within the departmental boundaries.