The Discovery University

The universities of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were afflicted by conundrums. Were they status institutions devoted to producing persons of estimable character or research institutions dedicated to creating original knowledge—or alternatively were they diploma mills whose business was to certify people for jobs? The omni-functional post-industrial university amplified such identity problems. It made it more and more difficult to answer a simple question: ‘what is a university?’ The classification of American higher education institutions includes research, doctoral and comprehensive universities alongside liberal arts colleges, associate institutions (community colleges), masters and baccalaureate colleges and universities, and special focus institutions. ¹ The research universities are further sub-divided into very high research activity and high research activity institutions. The folksier British schema of Oxbridge (ancient universities), red brick (nineteenth-century civic universities), plate glass (1960s universities) and the inevitable ‘new’ universities (the 1990s ex-polytechnics) indicate a similar incommensurable range of institutions. ² To answer the question ‘what is a university (or alternatively what is a college)?’ is rendered difficult. Humpty Dumpty said: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ This would seem also to be the case with the ‘universities’. Maybe this is a word we should always put in inverted commas. Nobody knows what it means except that it means whatever university presidents and vice-chancellors say it means. When the higher education sector expanded after 1970, the identity problem was exacerbated. The architect of the University of California’s golden era of expansion, Clark Kerr, thought this was a virtue. He called the resulting institution the ‘multiversity’. But what did that possibly mean? That a university was all things to all people?