Lately, I’ve been wondering whether we have reached some kind of dead-end in the history of universities.  Specifically, whether because of a combination of increasing regulatory control, professional conformity and institutional mission creep, we have got to a point where it has actually become impossible to imagine alternatives to the modern research university as a way of organizing post-18 education.

If you look back at the history of universities, you see periodic reinventions of the form.  There was the original Bologna-type university.  Paris and then later Oxford invented colleges, while at the same time moving from a student-controlled model to a faculty-controlled model.  The needs of the modern era created new forms of universities: in France, the revolution briefly resulted in the closure of all universities. Napoleon replaced them with a single Université de France (an evolutionary dead-end, as single public national universities never really took off anywhere else except in Chile and Uruguay, and even these are now gone), but he then proceeded to more or less ignore it in favour of more technical and “useful” institutions such as the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines.  These single-focus institutions lost out in the long run to multi-faculty universities, but they remain an important part of many countries’ higher education systems. They are present particularly in countries with a communist past, as they appealed to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s highly instrumentalist view of higher education.

In Germany, the Napoleonic Wars eventually – via a lot of salon discussions in Berlin – gave us the prototype for the modern research university, which in many ways was the antithesis of the small teaching institution with roots at the civic (rather than national) level, which at the time were growing like wildfire across North America.  But when, over the second half of the nineteenth century, Americans eventually worked out how to merge the undergraduate teaching university with the more graduate-oriented German research university, we reached the pinnacle of higher education institutions, which is still the template for prestige universities worldwide. 

We still weren’t done, really, with innovations.  The federated university model, or the Oxford system of “colleges-do-the-teaching-universities-give-the-exam,” spread to many parts of British Empire, and remains the rule in South Asia where a handful of universities sit in judgement of tens of millions of student enrolled in tens of thousands of university colleges.  Vocational institutions, often with their roots in the secondary system, turned themselves into short-cycle, professional education institutions which are “community colleges” in North America; in a few places they turned into polytechnics—more advanced and more theoretically oriented institutions, which operate as hybrids of the university and college levels.  Sometimes these ended up as institutions in their own right – in other cases (the UK, Ryerson) the term “polytechnic” was just a waystation to joining the ranks of the research university clones.  It was the same thing with “normal schools” – former short-cycle institutions which put people into teaching jobs around the world: these eventually became state colleges or regional universities, modelled on (and often staffed by graduates of) research universities, but without the money or size to compete in that world.

As Emily Levine recounts in Allies and Rivals (see my review back here) notes, the research university was the subject of a couple of reform movements in the first half of the twentieth-century.  Some people thought that research made institutions too elite, and tried to popularize various forms of popular education (e.g. the New School).  Others thought the opposite, that the grafting of undergraduate education debased the research effort and what was needed were pure research institutes liberated from the confines of the teaching profession (e.g. the Institute for Social Research).  These ideas eventually gained a lot more purchase outside the research university’s German-American heartlands, particularly in France and the Soviet Union – but by the end of the twentieth century both had faded as challenges to the Research University and now both countries are furiously focusing their attentions on trying to build more US-style multiversities.  The Research University, in a sense, responded to new institutions by upping its game (more on research than adult ed) and saw off the competition.

Now the weird thing is that there are a lot of people who recognize that relying on one type of institution to be responsible for the majority of both research and teaching is more an article of faith than an empirically-proven truth (for anyone tempted to quote the “research and teaching are mutually reinforcing” mantra here, let me point you back to this blog for a reality check).  And yet, over time, to ward off threats to its position, the research university has taken on all sorts of extra jobs/purposes: acting as a catalyst to local economic development, running hospitals and schools, acting as a think tank, re-skilling adult learners, etc.  And as new professions are born, research universities rarely miss a beat to create programs in new, ever-more applied areas.  

This mission creep works, in the sense that becoming the institutional equivalent of a Swiss-Army knife wards off any potential government impulse to create competing organizations that might be better able to achieve some of these goals (generalized collapse of state capacity and perpetual deficits limits impulses in those directions anyways, but it never hurts to make sure).  But it works at the cost of coherence at the institutional level.  And, maybe more seriously, in the absence of any competition, research universities have settled into complaisance about what they do and how they do it (don’t ask for examples, you probably know what I am talking about).

Yet evolution requires competition, and we need something to keep the Research University on its toes.  It doesn’t have to be government setting up competing institutions: in theory, private competitors could do it, too.  The problem is that nearly everywhere, in addition to suffering from a lack of prestige, new institutions get foisted with research university superstructures as the price of admittance to the world of higher education.    So, the worst of both worlds.

What might shake-up this world?  My guess is that it if it happens it will come through i) someone working out how to measure and credential skills in a way that employers collectively understand and recognize as easily as they now recognize degrees now and/or ii) a return of the federated college mode, where teaching and assessment are split.  Three are hints of both kinds of things right now (Western Governors University, famously, makes use of the teaching/assessment split).  But frankly it would take a lot of government effort, somewhere, to bring something like this into existence at a large enough scale to make a dent in the Research University’s overlordship. 

That doesn’t seem like it is going to happen any time soon.  Which leaves us stuck for the moment in the thrall of an ever-more bloated educational model, with little external pressure for change.   Unfortunate.