Our University – Work and Job

Warning – There is a three-letter word below that might be offensive – a slang word used to describe a persons rear end – but sometimes you just have to call it what it is.

I reflected recently on the difference between work and a job.  The worker sees something that needs to be done and pursues it because it advances the organization.  The holder of the job sees something that needs to be done, and may or may not do it based on whether or not it is his or her job.  The essential difference between these two people is simply that a worker improves the organization and the holder of a job covers his (here it comes!) ass.

CYA is job one.

It gets tiresome to talk with the holders of jobs.  They are always worried about whether they are doing something they should be doing or something they are not paid to do, or is not their responsibility to do, or the union does not allow  based on work rules, or, most painfully, that is “not my job”.   All good reasons not to do something, all good excuses to watch an organization be less than it can be.

CYA defines the job.

Going to work in the morning entails being excited about helping make something bigger than yourself, better.  Going to a job in the morning entails making sure you do nothing that in any way will have an impact on not being able to go to work the next day, that no one will scold you for not doing what you are supposed to do or taking on responsibility that is none of your business.

CYA is the work itself.

There is a ditch on both sides of this road.  Everyone doing what everyone thinks best leads to a form of anarchy and disorder.  However, everyone doing only what they are supposed to do regardless of its impact on the organization leads to something equal to anarchy in destructive force but follows the rules laid out in contracts, working papers, operating papers and other documents to a tee.  It is the hardening of bureaucracy to the point where its primary role is to perpetuate itself and, in the end, cannot identify the work even though every job is well known. 

CYA and nothing else.

The only places in the world where getting the work done is to define people’s jobs are in placement offices, head-hunting firms, and human resource operations.  I am not sure what a human resource is, but I think it has something to do with jobs mostly, and very little of it is directed towards work.  The work comes from somewhere else, some combination of head and heart that provides something people are willing to buy. 

A combination of passion and dedication allows risks to be taken.   A combination of reward and satisfaction brings out the best in a place of enterprise; I don’t care whether it’s a grocery store, bank, car dealership, church, big box retailer, or a mom-and-pop tomato stand.

No CYA here.

People who know the difference between job and work are found at successful organizations no matter their purpose, size, or supposed significance.  People complain about Wal-Mart but when I go there, I get the feeling that employees are at work, not at a job.  How is that possible?  The news tells us they are under-paid, have modest or no benefits, and generally are not well treated.  How can they appear to go to work and not a job?  There is something going on that I can’t understand but suggest that any organization having workers rather than job holders will eventually be very good.

No CYA here either.

Organizations that can’t distinguish between job and work will founder and fold.

Our University has real work to do, and I am thankful that I am around many people who know what the real work is. 

I am not going to tell you. 

It is as Joe Louis said when asked what it took to be a great boxer: “If you have to ask, you will never know.”

Our University – Allegiance

In political organizations, the first allegiance for all employees is to the elected official for whom they work.  For better or worse the elected official’s allegiance may be to party, to country, to ideology, or unfortunately in many cases, to self.

In corporate organizations, a person’s first allegiance may be to the corporation, or to supervisor. In “Miracle on 34^th Street” Macy’s won when they made their first allegiance to the customer, even if that meant sending their customers to other places where they could get a “better deal”.

In an excellent research university, the faculty members, who are the university, have a set of allegiances that are challenging to understand. 

Faculty members are cottage industries. 

They rise or fall on the quality of their work.  Even though they are supported by the state, or tuition, or large endowments in some combination, their effort is calibrated through intellectual output. 

Nothing else.

In excellent universities, excellent faculty members bring prestige to the university: They teach with passion, they carry out scholarly and creative work that attracts the attention of those distant from the campus, they win awards, their students gain scholarships and other recognition that elevates both the faculty member, and in turn, the institution.  This is a positive cycle that creates pressure through rising demand for excellence.

The importance of the cycle is that it begins with the faculty member.  In primary or secondary schools this is not necessarily the case.  Faculty members are not teachers in the sense that many use this word.  Likewise, in a college or community college, the cottage industry concept is only true to a limited extent. 

In research universities faculty cottage industry is the gut of the organization.

This creates special allegiances.  Faculty members must have a strong relationship to the discipline they belong to.  It is disciplinary excellence, recognized by peers, that allows the faculty member and university to gain prestige.  While the nuances of this might be argued, it means that the allegiance of the faculty member to the university itself may be subjugated to their ties to the discipline.

Even more confounding is that the very best faculty of any university must have a strong allegiance to their own success.  Remember they are cottage industries, not employees.  Unfortunately in some cases – thankfully few – this translates into a form of arrogance that is hard to stomach.  In most cases there is a balance attained between the passion of the faculty member and his or her service to the university, because there is a symbiotic relationship at play.  Good faculty work at good universities and each values the other.

A number of things can muddy the relationship of the faculty member to his or her work.  A blind allegiance to the university, especially if it is also alma mater, can create a false sense of purpose.  Likewise an allegiance to a labor union may make primary concerns of the intellectual work secondary. The work of a faculty member cannot become a job.

Faculty members don’t have jobs; they are CEO’s of their enterprise.  Hopefully they can excel, but they must be able to fail.

For a faculty member, allegiance to anything other than the development and sharing of insight and knowledge is a form of utility that undermines the value of the university for the greater social good.  Friedrich Schiller, the German poet and philosopher understood this clearly:  “Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.”

The cottage industry relationship, challenging as it is, must be part of our university.

Our University – Competition

 

When I was seventeen, like many young men I wanted a cool, fast car.  Many of my generation will remember the significance of a ‘55, ‘56, or ‘57 Chevy.  There were other cars, but all where second fiddle to the five, the six, or the seven.  I could not afford one and soon figured out that, no matter how much I spent on this demonstration of who I was I would never win the race.  There were too many other guys who had more.

I bought a ‘58 Chevy, not the sought after model but a Chevy none-the-less, and when I got done with it the car was cool enough to get the job done.  I will spare you the details, but it was a fairly nice ride in current parlance.

The lesson in this for me:  Mark the territory for your competition.  There were some areas where I could not effectively compete and I left them alone and focused on the areas where I could.  The ‘58 was OK if I approached it correctly.

So it should be with universities.

With increasing frequency, universities that try to compete on cost alone will lose to the University of Phoenix, the DeVry University, the Community Colleges, and the plethora of online opportunities to secure something that looks like a university degree.  It would be like me buying a bicycle because I could not find a 5, 6, or 7 that I could afford and “do it right.”  Rather I went with a different kind of car, but still a car.  Focusing on any aspect of university life other than academic excellence is akin to buying the bicycle rather that the car.  

A university is a university. 

Not a trade school, not a diploma mill, and not a credentialing academy that provides wall ornaments – like hood ornaments – with nothing under the hood. Many post-secondary educational institutions serve society well though the execution of a purpose, but they are not universities. 

And more telling, a university trying to be like one of these other institutions will become the other institution and cease to be a university.

All universities must compete with other universities to be considered a university.  Institutions that carry the name university must be good at a minimum of two things.

First, a university must provide a general education leading a student to be an educated human being.  This means that the graduate can read, write, think critically, calculate and understand basic mathematical principles – calculus – it means they are familiar with western and non-western thought and understand the significance of the great world religions and how their personal persuasion ties into the greater social order.  Achieving these goals is no mean task and many institutions, of every stripe, fail. 

A university must help people become well educated in the general sense.

Secondly, a university must build an academic reputation.  It must compete in some field of endeavor, in a way which is regarded widely by other universities as being exemplary in quality.  The areas of focus are as varied as the universities; the common ground is that an institution is recognized as being good at something and providing excellence in general education.  Athletics does not count, nor does cheap, nor does size.  These are not academic pursuits and, while exceedingly valuable in some measure, not suitable replacements for academic excellence in the competitive market place of higher education.

At our university we can not be all things to all people, but we need to be good at two things, or we are not what we should be.

Our University – History and Habit

All universities have histories.  Some aspects of those collected histories are powerful while some are minor nuances of institutional life.  Look at the impact of the shootings at the University of Texas on August 1, 1966, at Kent State on May 4, 1970, or more recently, at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.  These tragic events help determine what a place is. Little ties these events together other than the utter senselessness of them, and the fact that they occurred on university campuses.  As grievous as the personal losses to friends and family are, these events don’t define the institutions. 

Routines give life and definition to a place.

Recently, we learned that SIUC was no longer at the top of the party school list. No news here… it has not been on that list for a very long time and there are dozens of universities that are more defined by weekly revelry than SIUC ever was.  In addition, the university and the community working together have slowed a dangerous trend around Halloween where life and property were put at risk in a drunken brawl, as many people watched and did nothing. 

My first tour of the campus in 2001, on the second night of my initial visit, took me to where the action was on the strip, and the individual giving the tour explained to me how he and others watched the fracas from the roof of a nearby building.  He pointed it out with some degree of pride.  It was a distinguishing mark of the institution.

The traditions at places like Yale, or Texas A&M University are things that happen over and over again defining what a place is, who it serves, and why it exists. 

Customs shape a place.

The once in a lifecycle events that occur at a university, or in any other institution, may help define and give institutional perspective, but the truly important stuff happens every day, over and over again until something becomes a habit, hopefully a good one, and creates the identity of the organization, not by force, but by presence.

Just like a marriage.  How you do the dishes, put out the trash, brush your teeth, and pay the bills may be more important than an engagement ring or a honeymoon trip or a fiftieth anniversary party.

These things that shape us occur every day.  How does the teacher address the student who is struggling with the course material?  How does the organization recognize excellence? How does the custodial worker prepare the building for teaching, research and scholarly activity?  How often do students use the library to investigate something that has always been a curiosity to them, not just a requirement for class?  How do faculty give life to thought through their own study and creative work?  How do we welcome those who are different from ourselves? 

These are the things that make us who and what we are.  These day-to-day occurrences shape what the university is to a much greater extent than the once in a lifetime events that make headlines and then are remembered for their dramatic and distant impact. 

Tragic anomalies. 

Even seminal positive events, a national championship in a sport, or a Fulbright scholar every so often, don’t leave a lasting impact unless they become a habit.  Those things happening everyday need our utmost attention. 

Like a person, a university becomes what it daily lives.  

At Our University we need to be mindful of what Charles Noble said, “First we make our habits, and then our habits make us.”

Our University – Coaching

I was reading a piece about the “Big Dance” and how important it is to a university.  For the uninitiated few, the Big Dance is the annual NCAA basketball tournament that some feel will boost college enrollments, solve fiscal problems, raise average entering ACT scores, increase retention rates, give more students a chance to get an education, prevent cloudy weather, solve marital problems amongst members of the academic and extended community, and relieve backache simply through institutional participation in the annual event.

It is a series of basketball games, not the Second Coming.

On the other hand, I read a piece, I think on the same day, about our swim coach, Rick Walker, and his successful effort to save a swimmer in the Mediterranean Sea.  He was there as a referee or judge and Rick sensed a swimmer was weakening.  She was drowning.  He jumped in and saved her life according to Italian authorities, while helping to oversee the international open sea meet.

That is a big dance.

Many coaches, the best of them, are always teachers first and coaches second.  Not to undervalue Rick’s ability and willingness to step in and save a drowning swimmer, but he does that every day.  I know it.  He assists students who are drowning in doubt, lack of realized goals, inability to reach potential, misdirection, unwillingness to sacrifice self for the greater good, and all sorts of other maladies nearly equal in final effect to drowning.  Absolutely equal in this sense: the potential of a life fully lived is lost in every case.  

Good coaches who are great teachers know that and are key contributors to making a university excellent.  None of it has to do with the big dance in March.  It has to do with the idea that we are in the business of developing human potential.  Not a won-lost record, not a conference or national championship.  This is not to say those things would not be appreciated when earned under the correct circumstances and driven by the correct motivation.

Any basketball coach worth her salt will tell you the big dance is a derivative of great coaching, not the goal.  Those five guys or girls running to and fro on the hardwood floor are what coaching basketball is all about. A world record breaststroke is only as valuable to an education as the student who pulls his way down the lane.  The speed at which they do that is a secondary outcome of an investment of the coach and the athlete.  Rick Walker is a great coach and a great teacher.

BTW (For the uninitiated few BTW = By The Way) all of this can be reversed for great teachers.  They are all great coaches.

Laurie Bell is a former coach, if it is possible to be a former coach, on our campus.  She was an excellent field hockey coach, but in her second life works in the Office of Major Scholarships to assist, read: coach students in gaining prestigious national scholarships.  When she started this work in 2003 our record was not so strong.  In six years, our students have become Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellows, Udall Scholars, Goldwater Scholars, USA Today-All USA Scholars, and Homeland Security Scholars.  And these are just a few examples.

This too is a coach at work, not at field hockey but, at the very essence of coaching; and in fact all university life – the development of human potential.

Coaches and teachers, teachers and coaches, you can’t draw a line between the best of them, saving and building lives. 

That’s a big dance that will make a university great.

Our University – Discrimination

When selling my house a few years ago, bankers refused to underwrite a loan to an individual because he did not appear to have the ability to carry the note successfully.  Too bad there are not more discriminating bankers who, to the best of their ability, make an assessment of an individual’s ability to pay, and, should that individual appear not to have he capacity to “tote the note”, the bankers just say no.

Bankers, the good ones, discriminate for the benefit of all.

Good universities discriminate too.  When students apply, their records are reviewed and an assessment is made, usually by well-informed and well-intended people, to determine the ability of the student to “make the grade” and succeed in an academic environment. It is not the right of the university to exercise discriminatory insight; it is the appropriate exercise of responsibility. 

Admitting students who may do a good job in their studies, but who have not exhibited the combination of desire and ability to succeed in academic work, is a legitimate and entirely appropriate reason to just say no.

In fact, not doing so becomes a form of theft on the part of a university.

Nearly three quarters of the students attending public universities are enabled to do so through various loan and work programs.  More and more extramural support comes from government – state and federal.  This is a good thing, as human capital and its development is a precious resource for any society and it should always be fully developed.

However, to admit a student who, based on every bit of evidence and past performance, will not succeed in the university is theft of opportunity and resources.  This is most egregious when the student is borrowing money.  The issue is not as important when someone can pay.  It is nearly criminal when the university knowingly accepts people lacking the intellectual acumen and motivation to do well when they are borrowing to attend.

Some students show every ability and potential for success but flunk out.  OK.  But when students enter the university with the idea that, because they were able to borrow to attend, success is deserved or guaranteed, a troubling downward spiral is initiated.

Those students carry heavy debt load, do not finish their course of study, and have disdain for learning in all forms.

Nobody wins.

Faculty lose the desire to discriminate by assigning failing or low grades. Sometimes they are even overridden.  A friend at a prestigious New England university assigned a student the grade “F” in a course and was informed by his dean that students at this institution did not earn “F’s”.  My buddy ended up sticking to his guns in the face of significant challenges and left the university a year later.   The student probably stayed and graduated. Nobody knows.

Nobody wins.

Students are able to sustain themselves on pabulum for a few years but eventually flunk out, and this in turn causes university retention and reputation to fail. 

Nobody wins.

A lack of discrimination on the part of the banking industry in granting home loans has caused an industry-wide failure that will mark our current economic era for all human history.  We will get over it, but it will always be remembered as a dark period in the history of the United States. 

Less riveting, but equally pervasive, will be the long term effects of admitting students who are unqualified by past performance.  The veracity of intellectual capital will sink and higher education will suffer.

The truly heartless thing to do is tell someone they can when they can’t.  The thoughtful thing to do is tell someone to go get ready and come back when they are prepared and motivated.

Discriminate.

Our University – The Right to Fail

 

Clarion-calls for rights of every stripe fill the air on our university campuses across the nation.  This is as it should be.  There are those demanding the rights for the pregnant mother, and rights for the unborn, rights for the international student, and rights for the home folks, rights for people of various sexual persuasions and orientations, rights for the short, the fat, and the ugly, the tall, the skinny and the beautiful.  Every kind of right you can imagine.

Everyone must have rights.  

Maybe the only right that has gone out of fashion in the past few decades is the right to fail.

I have exercised this cherished right on a number of occasions, I will spare you the details save two.  I once failed calculus and, in the exercise of that right, experienced a kind of liberty coupled with embarrassment and humility, that many are denied.  Once I was judged to have failed at my job and relieved of my responsibilities; this too was an experience of varied dimensions but in the end, a growth opportunity of rare potential.   

The other day while talking with a family and a prospective student I was told with obvious chagrin by the mom, when I inquired as to the class standing of the prospective student that, “the school no longer ranked students.”  She wanted to discuss this idea with me and after a few minutes suggested that possibly his high school wanted all of its graduates to be “in the top half of the class”. 

I quietly concurred with her assessment.  Grade inflation, open admissions, and the diminution of performance on various measures subjective and/or objective, drive away the right to fail.  On many university campuses the average grade is B. 

It is a lie.

We open the barn door, and as that nag escapes, the stallion of success bolts too.

We want to live in a Ray Stevens world – you remember, “Everything is Beautiful”. A fine song maybe, but a crippling way to live because sometimes, in some settings, under some circumstances, everything is not beautiful.  Sometimes everything goes to dust right before your eyes and no one, under any condition should ever be denied the exercise of this basic right. 

It’s just not fair.

Of course there is a way to turn any failure into success, but I will not discuss that in this venue, rather I would like you to reflect on the possibilities.

For an institution to remove the possibility of failure, i.e. being in the bottom half, is to deny someone access to a motivating force of performance, the removal of a fundamental right and the potential to be a “victim” of failure.  You see, there is the problem. 

The victim of failure. 

I know more people who have succumbed to the perceived benefits of success.  I see too many empty eyes in those deemed successful by some standard that has relieved the individual of the possibility of failure.

Sheer emptiness.

That is a long way from calculus, but a short drive from the idea that students should not be ranked, or should not be told, “Sorry, you did not score high enough, you missed the mark.” Where is the crime in this, and at what cost do we deny that right?

A school or a university where everyone succeeds is not a place of learning and is of very low value.

Our University – The Fourth and Tenure

 

Independence of thought for a collected group of people and independence of thought for an individual are so tightly wound together that you cannot have one without the other.  First, the case of our nation.  The coercion exercised upon the early colonists of our nation was suffocating… they could bear no more.  Taxes, freedom to worship, freedom from social stratification, and freedom for opportunity to grow and change were all passions of early European citizens of the new world. 

The colonists wanted to be able to pursue their own lives in their own way without the intervention of any government, near or far.  While it was freedom from English law and rebellion against coercion that lit the fuse, freedom from all coercion carried the spark to the charge.

I re-read Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ a few times recently.  I consider myself reasonably thoughtful and able to understand complex ideas.  I was taken by the simplicity of the ideas Paine so graphically portrayed in this pamphlet, but perplexed by the depth and pervasiveness of them from another perspective. 

As I reflected on my small view of this great expression, person for person the most widely read document ever produced and circulated on the continent of North America, a number of emotions ran through my mind. 

I was, and I am still moved by a kind of patriotism that I know many of us feel for our nation.  A freedom to pursue personal faith, a pride in individuality, a freedom of expression of thought or a way of life that is particular to any one of us, unencumbered by intervention of any kind from any person, or any place.

What does this have to do with our university?

Not to over-make the case, I would argue that tenure provides to a faculty member the provision that our forefathers fought for, so that any man or woman might have the opportunity to think freely. 

The coercion that happens at many universities today is not the same as the one faced at the birth of our nation.  What was English was known to be English, and it was clear to many colonists that England was a coercive force. 

Coercive forces today lack that clarity in universities, and they have for a very long time.  Contemporary coercion comes in disguise, not in a Red Coat.

Coercion caused Galileo’s excommunication for the idea of a helio-centric universe.  It undermined the authority of the Catholic Church in the eyes of leadership at that time.

It was coercion that made the Protestantism of mid-twentieth century Yale University so challenging for a catholic boy named William F. Buckley. He should have thanked God he wasn’t Jewish.

It is coercion that makes traditional expressions of faith unacceptable in contemporary universities.  This is the coercion of trying to live in an offense-less society… a society where your ideas might offend another.  This impossibility might be the most noxious form of coercion in any setting.

It chokes free thought.

Our nation might be giving up certain freedoms through the force of courts, and our political leadership may be allowing and encouraging that strangulation for the friendship of the ballot box.  Academic freedom should be maintained at all costs. 

Coercion against intellectual freedom from any source, no matter how well intended, will undermine the nature of our university as surely as British rule undermined the freedom of this colony to pursue its destiny.

Our nation’s freedoms should ensure the academic freedoms of the university as surely as those same freedoms ensure the freedom of family, faith, and friendship.

The university should abound with patriotism for the power of Independence Day.

Our University – The Fix is In

There is a cloister of monks that makes wooden bowls from green, uncured lumber.  The bowls are very beautiful but they immediately begin to crack as the wood dries out and shrinks as wood is prone to do.  This is no surprise to the monks.  When the cracks occur, the monks very carefully begin a process of repair.  The repairs are made with a type of white plaster and, as the plaster sets, the bowls are sanded and rubbed smooth again.  And again.  And again.  And again.  The white plaster against the blood black wood makes traces and lines that look like river systems, arteries and veins.  The bowls are things of absolute beauty.  They do not look broken or like they have ever been fixed.

This process is a radical combination of planned obsolesce and deferred maintenance.

Our culture disdains maintenance.  People want things new, clean, and neat.  However, it is common that those things that are maintained take on the character possessed in the heart of the workers.  You need not be an aficionado to appreciate the beauty in it.

Universities across the nation suffer from scant funding and the strong heart to perform deferred maintenance.  Not much glory in repair.

A new building can easily and appropriately support a plaque that proudly proclaims it to be The John Smith Memorial Hall.

Can you imagine The John Smith Memorial Roof Patch?

The photo opportunities that are available when a new building is completed draw elected officials like a golfer in back swing during a lighting storm attracts  electricity.  Pictures of elected officials at ground breakings abound.  A shot of the painters after they have refinished the wood windows that have thirsted for that coat for twenty years cannot be found.

For our students, the purpose of the whole escapade, the opportunity to watch stewardship in action is a form of education – accentuated loudly by a society that largely disparages it, sometimes tolerates it, but never sees it like those monks.  It is an art form that a university and her students should aspire to.

Many of the people on university campuses who want to hold onto the “old buildings” are seen as backward-looking, rather than future-focused. While that is possible, I frequently find those who want to look back positively do so as a way to frame a future. 

I work in one of those old buildings that have, embedded in it, a history.  Here it is Home Economics, from the head, heart and hand of Professor Quigley.  Home Economics is not cool anymore.  It is not “in”.  At one time, by the look of what this building was, it was about the coolest thing in the world.  The building was beautiful, now it continuously cries for the hand of the monk, like so many buildings on so many campuses.

When I look at this place I see a lost art but I know that at the time of the original conception it was high art.  Passion at work.  Like great scholarship and emotionally charged teaching.

How to balance the complexities of building a modern research university is not a task for the faint at heart.  We need to see the campus as a wooden bowl, and when it cracks, we need to fix it.  Not because it is broken, but because a heartfelt fix begets beauty.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said “I see my trees repair their boughs”

At our university, the fix needs to be in.

Our University – Like a Church

I know I am trouble already with that title, but hear me out. 

For all the discourse about universities being like businesses, they are not run in a business-like fashion. Great businesses run on the nexus of merit, productivity and bottom line.  The best universities pay real attention to these ideas, but most only give them lip service, while the poor ones neglect even that.

Some think the university is a state agency: They miss the boat!  Some also think that its operation should be subject to the rule of patronage: They are all wet!

Universities are universities, unlike any other organizations; but if people insist on analogizing them to some other enterprises, we would be best served by thinking of them as churches.

Churches, temples, mosques, and almost all places of worship exist for a single purpose.  They exist to help people voluntarily change how they think about themselves in relation to the larger world around them.  From a Christian perspective in the plain language and tradition of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Saint Paul, and, by definition any man or woman who claims to be Christian, there is but a single purpose for any church:  for a man or woman to become more Christ-like. 

This is not something you can buy, not a ballot you can cast, not something you can trade, and most troubling in contemporary society, not something you can earn.  Rather it is a “skin in” transformation through the exercise of unadulterated free will.

Absolutely nothing more, and nothing less.

A student and his parents lay a check on the table, twice a year for four years, sometimes more checks for more years.  As these checks move across the table, from the family and student’s side to the university’s side, that exchange of value provides only one thing – the potential to change.

Opportunity.

Our university, and others worth their salt, provides the opportunity for students to change themselves from the inside out. 

Absolutely nothing more and nothing less.

We can’t change the students through any form of discipline, coercion, begging, pleading, threats, carrots, or influence.  We can only provide an opportunity for the students to inflict the burden of growth and change upon themselves.

Just like a church.

To be clear, trade or technical schools may be different, although only in degree.  A trade can be taught with a mild commitment of will, driven by a desire to produce capital to care for a family and provide sustenance.  The craft guilds provide guidance.

In the early first millennium, the guilds in India provided fraternity among workers and the sharing of ideas and insights.  Sounds a bit like a university.  By the beginning of the second millennium, the idea had gained traction in Europe, spreading from Italy into France and Germany and finally Spain.

Guilds bred two modern phenomenons: trade unions and corporations.  Precocious twins from the same parent.  After the 1800’s, they faltered and were seen simultaneously as a barrier to free trade according to Adam Smith, and a stigmatized social stratification according to Karl Marx. 

Talk about a rock and a hard place.

The university cannot provide a guarantee for employment upon completion of a course of study.

The university must be a strong advocate for the exercise of free will.  In the case of a public research university it must be the strongest civil proponent for the exercise of unfettered free will, free moral agency, and the pursuit of truth.  Otherwise it is not a university at all.

Our university should be more like a church than it is like General Motors, or the statehouse.