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Dear Colleagues, I see the discussion is tends to emphases the shortcomings of contemporary university as a university phenomenon. My position is different--the shortcomings of society are killing the university. The problem is how to save society from their short-sightedness. While the university has a lot of shortcomings, there are not what the mass media are telling us. I am also astonished that major intellectuals contribute to the misconceptions and disinformation. Basic sciences should follow the logic of their own life. Do not try to direct them with carrots (grants) and sticks (penalties). Applied research needs to be directed by creating incentives to work towards societal and professional needs. The question is how to design this so that it is not superficial and detrimental to research. R&D has achieved a balance in a natural way, but if the applied university research is poor and if basic researched is channelled in only several dozens of topics, R&D would not have a knowledge base to find out the necessary information for design-decision making. There are a lot of misconceptions about professional reproduction. Most of the leading intellectuals have no idea what they are talking about. Actually, they create the problem by forcing the university the wrong direction. As a design professional, I have experienced this many times. Intellectuals need to understand that the role of the university is not to follow business. If the university prepares custom-shaped graduates for today's business, society is done -- it will lose innovation potential and flexibility of intellect to adapt to ongoing changes. We have already good models around the World. The problem is that many people are short-sighted, not properly-educated, do not have information about these models, and stick to the old while pretending that they discover the future. Until society adopts the right position about science, scientific reproduction, and professional reproduction, we are in danger to stagnate. With the exception of computer technologies, all other branches are in stagnation compared to the spike years before and after WW2. However, nobody cares about this. Everybody works hard to improve babysitting and cost-effectiveness that in effect is waste of money. Until society understands the contribution of university to professional reproduction, we will be in a stalemate. I am curious what kind of a new institution the society will invent using the new electronic technologies. Theoretically, there is a reason to believe that there might be something new. The contemporary university emerged AFTER the industrial revolution as a response to the new demands of the industries. This how it went beyond theology, law, and medicine. This is how society started producing new experts and specialists for the industry. This is how society made a leap from the craft model of professional reproduction to the academic model. This is how human kind made huge progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. What I see on the websites on several research centers on the future of university is short of the right approach. It is responding to unreasonable societal pressures in an unreasonable way. I don't see a chance for designing a new institution if we think this way and if we go this way. Well, this is a huge topic and I have to stop here, short of sharing many other ideas. No time. I have to grade today. One more shortcoming of contemporary university:) There is one saying that we don't know what we gain when we lose; and we don't know what we lose when we gain. The society--university conundrum is in a similar state. My concern is that when we or our heirs understand that, we/they will found that we have lost many decades and maybe centuries in a stalemate. Human history can show us many such periods of human development. Of course, everything is relative. By the standards of 4,000 B.C. we might be moving forward. I personally am not happy with that speed of progress. I think the humankind can do better. Best wishes, Lubomir -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Arjun Dhillon Sent: Monday, December 18, 2017 4:04 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Who does the University serve in 2017? Ken is right: these questions must proceed from an answer to a much more basic and oft-disputed question: what is a university? The classical answer was articulated by John Henry Newman 150+ years ago in his Idea of A University. He said a university and its operations (including both research and a liberal education) is about knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This Platonic ideal has resonated with the academy ever since, and still informs much of how universities operate. A hundred years later, Clark Kerr pointed out that there is no such thing as a university anymore. Universities had instead become Multiversities, with many disjointed communities and purposes bound together by circumstance and bureaucracy. Most contemporary perspectives boil down to a division along the lines of research and teaching. The research side of the university today—what Ken described as Western universities’ mission to create new knowledge—is defined by a tension between dual purposes. We seek knowledge for its own sake, but we are also driven (and expected) to produce knowledge for the common good. Often we describe the educational mission of the university in terms of the ideals of liberal education. Yet operationally, we tend to frame this work as “teaching,” or more broadly “delivering” an education (primarily through a formal curriculum). But as I just argued in the thread Don started to celebrate the end of the university, this is a fundamentally flawed perspective. Framing university education this way is a mistake. We ought to take a broader view of higher education as self formation, and see the university as a context that cultivates student work in this endeavor. Anyway. I think this is a conversation well worth having here. I just spent a few years working and teaching within Georgetown’s Designing the Future(s) of the University initiative <https://futures.georgetown.edu/>, and while I’m pretty sure that Don is right, I believe designers are the best hope to change this situation, and reinvent the university. So maybe the better question is: what should the university of the future be? -a ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------