Dear All,
Stephen Allard’s question is something I’ve been considering for some time, along with others on the list. This question deserves a better answer than I have time to give tonight, but I will offer a few quick thoughts.
Eduardo Corte-Real noted a vital paradox of in the nature of the university — the university has two relations to knowledge, and these two relations capture a dynamic opposition. The university serves to generate new knowledge at the same time that it must preserve existing knowledge and the history of what we know.
At the same time, universities train specialists in the disciplines and professions, while universities also educate citizens. These two goals also lie in opposition to some degree, as the specialized professions seek to enhance the power and authority of the professional, while the nature of citizenship is to seek a common good.
These four missions have been at the core of the university since the beginning of universities in the West.
1) Creating new knowledge,
2) Preserving existing knowledge,
3) Training specialists, and
4) Educating citizens
Universities began as corporations or guilds. The word university comes from a Latin word, “universitas,” meaning corporate body, and the university was the corporation of masters and scholars.
Universities had several foundations. Papal establishment was only one among these. Some universities grew out of cathedral schools. The dean of the cathedral, the senior priest below the bishop, was the chief officer of education and master of the cathedral school. It is in recognition of this heritage that the heads of university faculties were first called deans. At some point, some cathedral schools grew to become universities, recognized after the fact by papal charter. Other universities were established and chartered directly by papal authority. The pope and the church also had a special role in granting certain kinds of recognition to existing universities that expanded their authority and the nature of the curriculum.
Still other universities formed as self-organized bodies of masters and scholars. Oxford and Cambridge began in this way, receiving a royal charter from the king of England well after the universities were established. Many great universities were founded independently, receiving charters or government recognition well after establishment. Some universities were founded by royal prerogative, others by principal or ducal authority, and so on.
The early universities typically had a “lower faculty” of the arts and philosophy and “higher faculties” for professional education in law, medicine, and theology. The lower faculty was not lower in the sense that it was lesser, but rather in the sense that it offered the fundamental education all scholars and professional required, whatever their later profession might be. At the same time, the higher faculties had specific jurisdictional authority over many issues.
This led to a serious debate in the late 1700s when Immanuel Kant wrote his book The Conflict of the Faculties. This book and the controversy around Kant’s ideas led to the foundation of the modern research university as we know it today. The first such university was the University of Berlin, founded in 1811, and with it, came the modern PhD degree. The Humboldt university reforms and the American land grant universities of the 1860s through the 1890s formed the core idea of contemporary universities through the late 1960s.
If you are interested in the details, you will find a discussion of universities and university history in this paper:
https://www.academia.edu/311100/Friedman._2002._Design_Curriculum_Challenges_for_Todays_University
The paper contains an extensive bibliography for those who wish to dig deeper. While I frame this with respect to the challenges of the design curriculum, I provide a general history as background, along with a broader range of considerations on the university itself — as distinct from design.
Lubomir Popov’s excellent discussion leads to a second important point. Universities today are not what they once were. Over the past half century, nations and societies have asked more and more of universities — at the same time that funding and support have decreased significantly in proportion to what universities are expected to be and do.
This challenge is exacerbated by an important series of changes. In many nations, the word university is now applied to several kinds of institutions. The term university was once restricted to the corporation of masters and scholar engaged in research and research-focused issues around learned professions and around scientific and humanistic disciplines. Other kinds of organizations of higher learning had other names: college, teacher’s college, normal school, art school, design school, polytechnic, TAFE, hochschule, högskolan, høyskole, technical school, and so on. Fifty or sixty years ago, there were perhaps one or two thousand organizations in the world called universities. Today, depending on how you count, and depending on whose tables and charts you use, there are somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 organizations designated as universities.
Many of these institutions were created by mergers among non-university institutions on the principle that if you put five or six teacher’s colleges and technical schools together, that would create a university. Others were created when what used to be an independent art and design school might be designated as a university, in the same way that Cinderella’s fairy godmother could use a magic wand and a spell to turn a pumpkin and mice into a team of horses and a magnificent carriage.
This leads me to a brief and unsatisfactory answer to Stephen Allard’s question. The question is, “Who does the university serve in 2017?” To answer it, one must ask, “What do we mean when we use the word university?”
Do we mean serious research universities such as Oxford, the University of Michigan, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of California, Peking University, or ETH Zürich? There are still only one or two thousand such institutions in the world. To ask who they serve, we must ask what we expect them to do.
If we mean all those many kinds of other institutions now designated as universities — 14,000? 22,000? — the story is quite different.
The earliest institutions that embodied parts of what are now the university date back to the Academy and the Lyceum of classical Greece, to the Great Library of Alexandria, to the House of Wisdom in Bagdad, to the Imperial College of China, and to several other centers of higher learning in India, Northern Africa, and elsewhere. The modern university was born in the middle ages in Europe, soon after the year 1000.
Our current version of the modern university dates to the early 1800s, but many earlier universities modernized, and the shift and clash of systems and approaches lead to what we have today.
Lubomir’s post describes some of the issues very well. We can’t ask who the university serves, or who it should serve — and how — unless we answer some of the questions at the heart of those issues.
The paper at this URL discusses some of these issues, as well, and I provide useful sources for those who wish to answer those questions.
https://www.academia.edu/311100/Friedman._2002._Design_Curriculum_Challenges_for_Todays_University
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
