It is supposed to assure academic independence, but it also pretty much assures the ability of professors to do and teach their own thing in isolation from others.
It is on its way out, in the opinion of Chaminade University's new president, Sue Wesselkamper. So are a lot of other change-resistant university structures and practices, she said in a recent talk to the Social Science Association.
Wesselkamper is the first woman university president in Hawaii and the first for a Catholic Marianist university. She came here last year from the College of New Rochelle, N.Y., where she was dean of arts and sciences.
She said universities are in the ironic position of having incubated new technologies but then having resisted adapting to them. She foresees a necessary move to new ways and even new places (Internet, for example) to serve more students better and cheaper.
The public, she said, has become more skeptical of higher education to such a point that former Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York was able to take $1 billion out of the state higher education budget to build 21 new prisons.
IBM was once a model corporation, widely applauded for the lifetime job security it afforded its employees and the loyalty it thus created. But IBM sickened and nearly died from its thus-created inertia and inability to respond to changing markets. The elimination of lifelong job security, Wesselkamper said, was one of the successful treatments on IBM's return to health.
"No" is her answer to the question of whether universities can successfully resist the forces they helped create.
She thinks close collaboration rather than independent scholarship will be one way to better use institutional resources and meet student needs on leaner budgets. There may be more liaisons with business.
Intellectual property will be the most prized commodity of the next century, she said. There will be great competition for it. It will have to be updated frequently. Workers will have to undergo frequent re-education.
The emphasis will be more on learning than on teaching but the student/teacher relationship will continue to be essential to the process.
Wesselkamper said a group of scholars 20 years ago identified 66 institutions that still existed in recognizable form from what they were in 1530, the year the Lutheran church was founded. They were the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man and 62 universities.
THINGS won't stay that way for universities, said Chaminade's president, who administers a student body of 2,200 students comprising traditional undergraduates but even more non-campus and older students seeking specialized knowledge.
She sees four years of university education being just the beginning of lifelong perpetual learning.
"We have to change," she concluded,"in order that we can continue to offer what is the unchangeable essence of universities - to be centers of discourse which prepare students to contribute positively and effectively to the intellectual, social and moral fabric of our society."