Dear David,

Thanks for your note. I agree with you on most points and I agree
with myself as well. These views don't clash because they involve the
passages in my note that you didn't quote.

Funding was only one issue, mentioned funding as a condition for
research because researchers have to eat. As you state, funding does
not drive good research. Human factors - curiosity and intelligence
among them - drive good research.

The key point on which you didn't quote me is the systemic nature of
academic freedom in good research universities and research-based
professional schools.

I wrote that these "universities tend to generate a rich combination
of basic, applied, and clinical research, often in partnerships and
networks with other universities and with industry," and that
"academic freedom means that we can devote [our] time to the research
topics that interest us."

It's true that many universities focus on teaching and conservation,
but research universities are not museums. They do not merely
preserve. They create. In research universities and research-based
professional schools, people discover facts, develop information, and
construct knowledge.

My note focused on research universities and research-based
professional schools. These are a special category among the world's
many thousands of colleges and universities. These are the
universities that we see, for example, in the survey of the world's
leading universities published by the Institute of Higher Education
at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I came to my views on universities through extensive empirical
research. In the 1970s and 1980s, I did a dozen or so massive
empirical studies on all 4,500 accredited colleges and universities
in North America. Four studies focused on art and design schools;
four studies involved faculty members in art and design schools
including researchers and practitioners; one study focused on 1,500
selected art and design schools, one study included researchers and
practitioners in a larger study on outstanding professional artists,
art historians, and designers. I also did field research and case
studies by visiting 300 art and design schools in North America,
comparing university-based schools with independent schools.

While I made a special subject inquiry into art and design, I also
studied universities as a specific phenomenon. The largest and most
interesting study did not focus on art and design, but on
universities themselves. To conceptualize and develop a major
publishing venture, I used the complete catalogues of some 3,000 or
so colleges and universities to analyzed the structure and content of
academic disciplines and subject fields. In the 1990s, I have
conducted research on research and research education in art and
design. In the past four years, I have been examining the history and
development of education in universities and professional schools
over many centuries and I've done some large-scale research on the
role of design education in research universities.

Everything you write is true in some universities and everything I
write is true in others. I'm not as pessimistic as you are about the
structural deficits of the modern research university. This may
involve the nature of the research university in general, as
contrasted with the struggles we are still encountering in the
formerly vocational design fields, where university-based departments
and schools are relatively recent.

Research universities are conservative in dialectical relation to
several radical features that they embody. The dialectical tension
embodied in a great research university is quite different from the
tensions we find in teaching universities. These tend to be highly
conservative, as you note. This conservatism is particularly apparent
in schools teaching the professional fields that grew out of the
ancient guilds.

A quick look at the history of universities and other kinds of
research institutions shows why they are both conservative and
radical. I won't provide the history here - I'm not ready to
summarize 5,000 years of history an hour before midnight on a rainy
Saturday.

Instead, I'll offer the short summary: The task of developing,
discovering, and constructing different kinds of knowledge made these
institutions a locus of inquiry and sometimes of dissent. The task of
preserving what was developed, discovered, and constructed also made
these institutions centers of conservation and sometimes of
conservatism. As social organizations, universities also have a twin
dialectic born of four social functions:

I've mentioned the first.

1) Creating new knowledge,
2) Preserving existing knowledge,

The second is even subtler. It involves:

3) Training specialists,
4) Educating citizens.

Here, we find different kinds of stresses and claims in frequent competition.

These tensions give rise to precisely the systemic and structural
problems you describe. The effect of these tensions in the ancient
universities gave rise to the debate crystallized in Kant's great
book the Conflict of the Faculties. The 1798 publication of Kant's
book led to the Humboldt university reform in Germany and the birth
of the first modern research university, University of Berlin. Many
universities continue to experience the tension between the
conservative ancient university subject to state or church control
and the principle of free inquiry. The result is a system that
structurally supports free inquiry and exciting research on some
occasions while the same structure inhibits it on other occasions.

Human beings create all research organizations and all research
support systems. All, therefore, suffer limitations of one kind or
another. I understand your views and I agree with them. Your view on
the systemic conservative nature of universities probably holds true
for the vast majority of the world's university. Where I propose a
difference is in recognizing the qualitatively different nature of
research universities and research-based professional schools. I'm
suggesting that we acknowledge the double nature of these
institutions, a nature that is both radical and conservative.

I have a mild disagreement with only one point in your note. It
involves a misreading of my assumptions.

I don't assume that we would have all the freedom we need but for
funding. I simply state that some research universities and some
research-based professional schools give us all the freedom we need.
My optimism probably springs from the fact that I work at two such
schools.

I'd be curious to hear what others think based on their experience in
different kinds of schools.

Best regards,

Ken