idad
September 21, 2009, 5:40pm
52
<p>Again, increasing the visibility of the product and making life on campus better for students does not necessarily mean one abandons the market that makes the product unique. Dell sells more computers than Apple, but Apple made the most of its niche and now is far more profitable. It has never succumbed to the me too approach, and has recently grown to own 90% of the $1000 and up, high-margin, notebook market. UofC, has I believe, been successful in the past few years doing the same type of thing. Moving to be another Dell, or Ivy school, is a path to eventual blandness, and an eventual loss of market share. Beyond that, it is that special mission that Chicago has always had, that dedication to at least try to be one of the last “pure universities” that is at risk. </p>
<p>As Don Levine described so well in the opening of his great discussion, “On the Genius of this Place”
While the public has been napping, the American university has been busily reinventing itself. In barely a generation, the familiar ethic of scholarship-baldly put, that the central mission of universities is to advance and transmit knowledge-has been largely ousted by the just-in-time, immediate-gratification values of the marketplace. . . . Gone . . . is any commitment to maintaining a community of scholars, an intellectual city on a hill free to engage critically with the conventional wisdom of the day. (Kirp 2000)</p>
<pre><code> So speaks David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, in a recent article entitled “The New U.” Grant him the margin of hyperbole that writers love to grab the attention of an audience, and you will still have to admit-at least, if you have been in touch with the world outside of Hyde Park-that Kirp’s words capture one central tendency of today’s academic world.
Sociologist Robert Bellah provides context for the change Kirp notes by tying it to the recent tendency in American thought to identify freedom with the free market. Challenging that linkage, Bellah argues:
<p>What is freedom in the market is tyranny in other spheres, such as the professions and politics. A decent society depends on autonomy of the spheres. When money takes over politics, only a facade of democracy is left. When money takes over the professions, decisions are made on the basis of the bottom line, not professional authority.</p>
<p>In the sphere of higher education, Bellah argues, the tyranny of the bottom line is beginning to dominate decisions in many ways, including the assessment of programs in terms of “faculty productivity” and “consumer sovereignty” (Bellah 1999, 19).</p>
<p>… In a follow-up essay in 1992 entitled “The Idea of the University,” Shils reviewed these secular developments and concluded that by that point universities had changed “nearly out of recognition.” If they continued in that direction, he prophesied, “they will cease to be universities, except in name. They will cease to nurture and inculcate the moral and intellectual standards and aptitudes indispensable to research; they will cease to deal with fundamental problems for their intrinsic interest” (244). The only thing that can be done to forestall their ultimate disintegration, he asserted, “is that the universities must be alert to save their own souls” (245).</p>
<pre><code> The threats identified by Shils have not diminished. They have been augmented by challenges stemming from the knowledge revolution of recent years, challenges so novel he could not have anticipated them a decade ago. If we follow Shils’s advice to alert universities to save their souls, then they must have some idea of what soul it is they ought to be saving. They must articulate afresh what it is that constitutes The Idea of the University.
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<p>[The</a> Idea of the University Colloquium: Donald N. Levine](<a href=“http://iotu.uchicago.edu/levine.html]The ”>The Idea of the University Colloquium: Donald N. Levine )</p>