We take large, modern research universities so much for granted that it requires an effort to realise how easily we could do without them - even Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford, to take the three that members of the academy themselves recently rated as the best in the world. Consider the higher education of the young. One of university’s main functions in the field of tertiary education - pre-professional education - could be performed in schools of law, accountancy, medicine, teacher-training and the like where professional education itself is given. As for liberal education - introducing students to a wide range of disciplines to develop their minds while they are young - it is best provided in small colleges by people who take it seriously. It is not assisted, but threatened, by diversions of time, money, and managerial effort into the research activities of the modern university.
”Blue skies” research could easily be done in publicly funded research institutes by professional researchers unencumbered by the pretence that they are engaged in teaching the young. And the function that increasingly dominates the life of the modern university - doing research and development for the benefit, and often under the control, of multinational pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies - could and perhaps should be done in commercial research parks. The new California Institutes for Science and Innovation described in Jennifer Washburn’s University Inc. are to all intents and purposes just that, even though they are one-third funded by the State of California and two-thirds by private corporations, physically housed on the campuses of the University of California system, and staffed in part by academics.
