ABSTRACT

The university was a sacred space founded on the basis of the freedom of its members to pursue the truth. The first universities of the Middle Ages, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, were seats of religious instruction, debate, and research; the evolution of cathedral and monastery schools concerned with questions of heresy and the need to establish the truth. The university was created because society believed certain things to be true and to be good and, to be worth preserving, worth handing on to the next generation. Few accounts of the end of the university have compelling suggestions for how to move forward nor any inspiring vision of what the future might hold beyond McUniversity. The university as it is today at least across most of the Western world has become a reflection of what society is. New universities must task themselves with coming up with new models of society, finding new answers to the question of how to live together.