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Let me, at the risk of seeming impertinent, offer a timely illustration of what I mean. At the beginning of his volume of collected essays entitled Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), Edward Shils has a moving chapter of autobiography, a pilgrim's progress of his mind. It is on pp. vii–xliii. He cites the many books and many teachers who have influenced him. I would expect practically all these books to be available to a student in most university libraries in the English-speaking world. So I ask myself: if Shils had spent his undergraduate career and been a junior faculty member in (say) North Dakota instead of Chicago, would his progress have followed a similar path? And my answer is: yes.
Shils, Edward, The Academic Ethic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 8. First published in Reports and Documents, Minerva, XX (Spring-Summer 1982), pp. 107–208.
Quoted by R. Steven Turner in an essay on “University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany 1706–1806”, in Stone, Lawrence (ed.), The University in Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), Vol. II, p. 508.
The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s, Cmnd 9524 (London: HMSO, May 1985).
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This previously unpublished essay by the late Lord Ashby was originally intended for the Festschrift in honour of Edward Shils' seventy-fifth birthday in 1985 (Greenfeld, L. and Martin, M., eds, Center, Ideas and Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). We are pleased to publish it now, unchanged.
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Ashby, L. Centre and periphery in academe: Some personal reflections. Minerva 34, 95–101 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00124204
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00124204