ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the malaise through a historical overview of the transformation of the American university from a student-centered college to a research university. The outcry for publicly oriented sociologists may well express the need that sociology has for a third way between the student-centered and utilitarian conceptions of the university. Abraham Flexner played a prominent role in moving American universities away from the primacy of the student-centered philosophy. A series of documents from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) intimates a relationship between the concept of faculty freedom, and the dissolution of the student's pre-adult status. Parsons and Platt argued that the professionalized demeanor of the faculty provides the young with a resource more valuable than intimacy. Only sociology views the world in terms of "civil society" and "the interests of humanity". In reality, there are numerous critics of inequality and of capitalism spread across all the humanistic and social scientific disciplines.
