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Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 9:46 am

Lately I have been prompted to think about this question. And evidently it led to googling that led me to this gem of an forward for a book entitled What is a University authored by PETER MILWARD

Let me take the liberty of quoting a part of that article:

KAMRAN MOFID wrote:

Changes are occurring every day on a national and world scale – we are faced with economic globalisation, the revolutions in information technology and biotechnology, growing inequality and social exclusion (leading to a renewed struggle for citizens’ rights), violence of all kinds, environmental pollution and climate change. All of these things are increasing the need for new knowledge and skills, for new scenarios for our global society. Love, courage, honesty, justice, spirituality, religion, altruism, vocation, creativity– life itself – are again becoming major issues.
In today’s largely decadent, money-driven world, the teaching of virtue and building of character are no longer part of the curriculum at our universities. The pursuit of virtue has been replaced by moral neutrality – the idea that anything goes. For centuries it had been considered that universities were responsible for the moral and social development of students, and for bringing together diverse groups for the common good.

In the last few decades, however, and especially since the 1970s, a new generation of educational reformers has been intent on using places of learning, and in particular universities, to solve national and international economic problems. The economic justification for education – equipping students with marketable skills to help countries compete in a global, information-based workplace – has overwhelmed other historically important purposes of education.
The language of business management is now being applied to educational establishments: schools and universities are ‘downsized’ and ‘restructured’, and their staffing is ‘outsourced’. But, if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only towards enhancing this narrow vision of a country’s economic success? Is everything public for sale? Should education be answerable only to the ‘bottom line’? Are the interests of individuals and selective groups overwhelming the common good that the education system is meant to support?
I have been part of these changes and have witnessed their negative consequences for students and staff. An education system that has turned students into customers or clients,pitted members of staff against each other, removed collegialityand turned classrooms into mass-production factories, financed by profits from the sale of alcohol, cigarettes, medical drugs and arms, has brought a bitter harvest and needs to be changed. Education has to be reunited with its roots in theology, philosophy and the virtues.

This treatment of students as customers, and courses as goods and services, isregards the truly important human values, and creates unhappy, purposeless and dysfunctional people who don’t know who they are or where they are going.

I should like to quote from the book I recently co-authored with the Rev Marcus Braybrooke:
From 1980 onwards, for the next twenty years, I taught economics in universities, enthusiastically demonstrating how economic theories provided answers to problems of all sorts. I got quite carried away by the beauty, the sophisticated elegance, of complicated mathematical models and theories. But gradually I started to have an empty feeling. I began to suspect that neo-liberal economics was an emperor with no clothes. What good were elegant theories which were unable to explain all the poverty, exclusion, racism, corruption, injustice and unhappiness that exist in the world?
I came to feel that my life as a lecturer was like a make-believe movie: sit and relax … in the end models dreamt up by detached economists will sort out the world’s ills! My classrooms were becoming unreal places. I began to ask fundamental questions of myself. Why did I never talk to my students about compassion, dignity, comradeship, solidarity, happiness, spirituality – about the meaning of life? We never debated the biggest questions. Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? I told them to create wealth, but I did not tell them for what reason. I told them about scarcity and competition, but not about abundance and co-operation. I told them about free trade, but not about fair trade; about GNP – Gross National Product – but not about GNH – Gross National Happiness. I told them about profit maximisation and cost minimisation, about the highest returns to the shareholders, but not about social consciousness, accountability to the community, sustainability and respect for creation and the creator. I did not tell them that, without humanity, economics is a house of cards built on shifting sands. Where was the economic theory that reflected my students’ real lives? How could I carry on

Source: http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/jgcg/downloads/WhatIsAUniversity.pdf

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 12:12 pm

Here's a section of a page from the book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance in which the author Robert M Pirsig expounds on the idea of a University:

Robert M Pirsig wrote:

The real University, ....., has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

In addition to this state of mind, “reason,” there’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.
But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.
Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2009 12:34 pm

I have been off late wondering "what a University ought to be?" Being unable to articulate my ideas, i googled and lo I found a webpage that apparently does it. Guess from which country the author of this article belonged to? Nigeria!!

Surprised? read on Smile

Abdullahi Musa wrote:

...........................I was tempted to apply believing that the challenges facing universities is more managerial than academic. With a managerial bent of mind; that is a mind that is results oriented, one can find ways and means of squeezing extra juices out of existing resources. Management entails also the ability to motivate. The variables here are both staff and students; of more importance, the students. If the horizon of the students is expanded, if they are made to see life beyond a certificate that does not carry the full meaning, one would have gone along way in shaping the future of the universities.

The first requirement to be qualified for the position of a Vice Chancellor is to be a Professor. One should have published many academic papers in acceptable journals; undertaken and supervised researches and so on. I have none of these. What I do have is a vision of what a university ought to be; who are its pillars; and what to do to strengthen those pillars in order to support it better. But like many things Nigerian, we are more comfortable with semblance rather than reality. Without a motivator, cash and many facelifts will not do the trick. Vice Chancellors have come to be seen as political office holders. They have to fit into the surrounding society’s power structure, as it is the one that will absorb them after they complete their term of office. Right from the onset therefore, such a candidate has lost vision. His or her mission is to maintain just enough peace for the make-believe to continue in the name of learning. Meanwhile those with a violent streak dominating their nature come to see through the whole charade, and insist that authorities have lost the moral platform on which to stand and shape or direct their affairs. Using cultism they unleash terror with which they hope to cow adversaries, (lecturers inclusive) into submission.

And universities must suffer from the same neglect which other segments of the society are suffering from those who cannot manage human resources. Our leaders do not have the time to think and plan how to galvanize such tremendous human resource as Nigeria’s population to greater productivity and glory. As a result they leave many to either rot or under-perform through out life due to poor education or lack of supporting infrastructure.

Our universities must reflect what we are as a people. The moment we choose to be different, they will also be different. It is the will to choose that has so far eluded us.

Source

Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 10:01 am

Lately, i have been induced to think about this concept by some discussions with friends. So here go my fresh thoughts Smile

A university has to be like a nursery of plants, that nurtures plants having particular traits. It has to be a nursery for nurturing minds. Instead what we witness today, are production lines in factories that produce human resources for the profit making corporations. They tend to duplicate, minds that are themselves mediocre, being the product of the same system. Most often managers of these human factories act more like union leaders, whose primary interest is to protect the interests of their colleages, be they the teachers or students at the cost of quality of education. The primary motive of the present day universities has boiled down to protect the interests of its dons rather then the quality standards of education. Thus, any suggestions for improving the quality of education are unheeded simply because they may be against the interests of their community members, who have become members of the community mainly on the strength of nepotism and favoritism. For example, in the Indian University system, a person is appointed to teach in a university, on the basis of his/her research publications or on the basis of a test conducted y UGC. It is presumed that any person who passes such examination qualifies to be a member of the University community. But one of his/her main duties is to nurture the minds of the students through lectures etc. But, nowhere it is required that a potential university teacher undergoes a training for teaching or his/her skills to teach are tested.

Many years ago, the UGC established centers called CPDHE, for enhancing skills of its faculty to teach. Most often these centers conduct Orientation courses and Refresher courses etc for the new recruits. In these courses all the participant teachers (except a few who act as resource persons) are required to sit in classrooms and listen to lectures delivered by some influential senior teacher on some topic of the curriculum. The teachers qualify to get promotion on the basis of attendance in these courses. But, teachers are seldom asked to demonstrate their understanding or communication skills, that are taken for granted at the time of employment.

Is that the real university for? Do the present day universities can really measure up to the real concept of University or are the progressively being degenerated into production lines for producing manpower for offices, factories, and colleges for training Question

Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 2:32 pm

Here's yet another oration about the concept of University. This time the author is himself a vice Chancellor of a University, he is Professor Alan D Gilbert, Vice-Chancellor, University of Melbourne. I found the article on a website called "Menzies Oration on Higher Education"

Professor Alan D Gilbert wrote:

Some Heretical Ideas About Universities

9 October 2005
If I were to ask each of you to outline your understanding of the idea of a university, I am sure that there would be marked differences of substance and emphasis in the replies. Equally, I am sure that the views elaborated would in many cases be very strongly held. That is what makes the idea of a university so contentious. Like a battering ram, it has major impact but little precision. As so often in English usage, the definite article is problematic. Had John Henry Newman resisted the word "the", and described his famous treatise as, "some ideas about universities", or "ideas about some universities", or "ideas for a new university in Ireland", much academic huffing and puffing might have been avoided.

Universities are among history's most robust institutions. Forgetting their roots in Plato's Academy, there have been more than nine centuries of continuous history since the first monastic universities appeared in Europe. But it has not been through one defining "idea of a university" that these curious institutions have worked their civilizing alchemy for nearly a millennium; it is through many evolving ideas about what a university is and what it stands for.

At the beginning of that long history, the monastic university was concerned exclusively with the preservation of knowledge and its transmission to successive generations of monastic clergy. Scholasticism then re-shaped the idea of a university. By opening their doors to the lay clergy, who were active in parochial rather than monastic activities, universities were exposed to a wider range of social and intellectual issues. This did not make them in any sense secular institutions, but it did promote authentic intellectual activity. Increasingly irreverent critiques of received wisdom became possible (if often dangerous) in such universities, and rational inquiry began, tentatively at first, to test the boundaries of faith-based knowledge.

The intellectual culture and values of Renaissance universities still bore only the most distant resemblance to modern ideals of academic freedom, rational inquiry and the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Yet major changes were afoot. The rise of humanism, the resurgence of classicism and the early development of empirical science combined to strengthen and enrich the increasingly this-worldly orientation of higher learning. These were slow processes. The modern idea of a secular university as a place where rational inquiry and the remorseless logic of empirical falsifiability hold sway would have remained incomprehensible, at least until the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and unwelcome until well into the 19th, when a flowering of explicitly secular universities accompanied a more general secularization in British, European and North American cultures.

Perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of academic freedom came from the stern, no-nonsense Prussian intellectual and bureaucrat, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who more than any other single individual, a man uniquely influential in the development of modern German ideas about universities. His advice to the founders of the new University of Berlin in 1809 remains as acute and relevant as ever. Appoint "the best intellects available," he told them, "and give them the freedom to carry on their research wherever it leads." For von Humboldt, fatefully, that meant giving the State a decisive role in academic appointments. Scholars, whom he described as, "the unruliest and most difficult to pacify of all peoples", could not in his view be trusted to make judgements based on merit alone. "They besiege me", he told his wife in a private letter, "with their eternally self-thwarting interests, their jealousy, their envy, their passion to govern, their one-sided opinions, in which each believes that his discipline alone has earned support and encouragement." In the Prussia of 1809, we must presume, the same was not true of politicians and bureaucrats, for it was to them that von Humboldt turned to remedy these anarchic tendencies within the academy.................more

Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 11:16 am

The major function of a University is to induce people to learn, not only what has been learnt by learned scholars, but also the art of learning Smile

Lately i have been reading an interesting article about this subject, and i would like to share it with the readers of this thread:

Roger C Schank wrote:

WHAT TO KNOW, HOW TO LEARN IT

What should an educated person know? In school, little time is devoted to answering this question. The school already knows what you need to know: vocabulary about phyla, the plots of various pieces of last century's literature, and how to prove a theorem about triangles. When you try to get computers to know things in order to make them act "intelligently," however, it turns out that these are not at all the sorts of things they need to know. Computers need to know how to do things, how to comprehend what others have done and said, and how to learn from the mistakes it makes in doing all this.

To educate a computer means giving it the ability to make inferences (if John hits Mary it means she is probably hurt, angry, and may hit him); to infer beliefs (if the U.S. bombs Iraq the U.S. must believe that violence is justified by the need to cater to one's economic interests); and to learn from failure (when you order filet mignon on an airplane and it is overcooked mush, you might want to remember this the next time you're ready to board a plane and get a yogurt first). These are exactly the same things people must learn how to do. We know that a computer, for instance, can be programmed to have encyclopedic knowledge about random facts, but I don't believe that this would mean it is "intelligent", any more than I would consider a person who merely has the ability to spout random facts to be intelligent. But despite what we know about how people learn and the very make up of intelligence, schools remain firmly grounded in the learning model that emphasizes facts and downplays doing. This separation of learning from doing is very detrimental to all.

It has become fashionable recently to define intelligence by using various "literacy lists." The bookstores are full of lists of different kinds of facts--scientific, cultural, even religious facts--all purporting to explain exactly what it is that a person must know to be "literate." The idea here is that being educated means knowing stuff. Implicit in all this is that we have, as a society, agreed on what stuff everyone should know, and decided that information delivery is the role of education.

Do not believe it. There is no set of stuff that everyone should know. What? No George Washington? No Gettysburg Address? It doesn't hurt to know these things, of course. But it does hurt to adopt the position that since one should know these things, teaching them to students is what learning is all about. This makes school a fairly boring, stressful, and irrelevant place, as you may have already discovered.

Facts are not the currency of learning, nor does mastery of them indicate anything about an educated person. Facts play a big role in the education system because they are so easy to test. And, it is tests (usually highly irrelevant tests) that have helped shape your learning since you were six. Curiously, most important things that people know they cannot explicitly recall or state as facts. What is the right way to get the person of your dreams interested in you? How does one pursue a successful career? Was the United States wrong to believe in "Manifest Destiny"? Is the situation in Bosnia really all that similar to Nazi Germany, or is it more like Vietnam? An educated person might have answers for these questions. But they are not simple questions and there are no simple answers for them. Being educated means being able to understand the questions and knowing enough relevant history to be able to make reasoned arguments. Making reasoned arguments, not citing history, is the key issue here. Learning to think and express what one has thought in a persuasive way is the real stuff of education. ................
more.....

Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2010 11:58 am

Here's yet another article on the subject., that I have liked:

Gopalan Ravindran wrote:

The lost idea of a university?
At a time when the higher education sector, across the world is in a state of unprecedented transformation, thanks to the deep impact made by the “market forces,” is it worth ruminating on the original idea of a university that sought to create free, liberal and critical minds?
The original idea of a university, as exemplified by ancient Indian universities like Takshila and Nalanda, as well as continental ones such as Oxford and North American ones such as University of Virginia, was all about freeing the human mind and making it fly on the intellectual plane of multidisciplinarity.
The widely held contemporary notion of university as a site of utilitarian, job/trade-oriented courses and disciplines is an antithesis of the original idea of a university. The other name for the original idea of a university is liberal education or liberal arts education.
What is liberal education or liberal arts education? According to Paul Henry Newman, who wrote the classical work, The Idea of a University, liberal education denotes “the process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture.”
How was this tradition forced out of the portals of modern universities? Bitten by the demands of industrial capitalism during the last century, universities in Europe and North America gravitated towards the notion of universities as productive places. In this reconfigured idea of a university, the demands of the numerous trades were sought to be pandered as effectively as possible by the proliferation of narrowly focussed academic disciplines, aka “managerial disciplines.”
In the place of free-wheeling intellectualism of the liberal arts education and its critically focussed multi-disciplinarity, utilitarian and trade-oriented education streams became popular with the governments and the people who were incorporated into such a system as it offered “attractive” gains such as jobs along pre-planned career trajectories. In the process, what was lost was a hoary tradition in which a university level student was expected to be as good in his primary discipline as in a clutch of related and unrelated disciplines. As a result a mathematician was also grounded in philosophy as well as astronomy. A science student was made to get a larger picture of his science and the society through a subject like history. Similarly, a student studying history was made aware of the conditioning of modern history by science as well as economics.
Why do we need liberal arts education now more than ever before? Among scores of reasons, the most important one is this — it is a futile exercise to impart skills, training and disciplinary knowledge to students without making them aware of the historical, sociological, political and other societal contexts in which they find place.
A true knowledge economy requires universities to contribute to the emergence of a steady flow of free and critically thinking minds, which are also technically competent, and not a flood of skilled labour emerging out of trade-oriented and job-oriented courses with the euphemistic tag, “knowledge workers.”

(The writer is head of department,Journalism and Communication, University of Madras)