ABSTRACT
In 1930 Abraham Flexner in his influential book Universities: American English German called the university 'an expression of the age. Certainly, it is as the product of the successive scientific, technological, and social revolutions of the twentieth century that the modern university is naturally regarded. The modern university, it seemed, could mobilise and organise the intellectual resources of society and so manufacture progress, in the same way that a modern economy could mobilise and organise the physical and human resources of society to create wealth. The relationship between an open and democratic society and the development of the modern university is at least as important as higher education's more ambiguous relationship with economic growth. In the modern university, therefore, the product was knowledge as much as students. The organic knowledge of the liberal university was replaced by the fissiparous knowledge of the modern university. The commitment of the modern university to vocationalism has been much more intense.
