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
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