ABSTRACT
The third model in this chapter portrays the university as a complex institution, or perhaps an aggregation of institutions loosely held together, which performs an array of educational, research, consultative, and other services for American society as a whole. Like all social institutions which undergo rapid change, the multiversity exhibits a considerable incoherence between its new, expanding programs and its sizable body of established, traditional activities. The multiversities become social service stations. The multiversity is not a mere receiver of social benefits, the terminus of a flow of social wealth. The criterion of admission to the multiversity, however, is not profitability in the economic sense but profitability in the social sense. Social justice, as well as history, requires the university to serve the society in which it resides. Clark Kerr's vision of the university of social service poses a great choice to those of us who care about the future of the academy.
