Bring back The Groves of Academe

Abstract

There is a malaise creeping into the American tertiary education system. Shared governance of the academe is slowly becoming a dinosaur. Tuition costs are increasing at triple the general inflation rate. Tenure-track faculty are replaced by term teachers. Massive open online courses are mushrooming. And universities in the United States are no longer the envy of the world. Those interconnected vagaries will be raised in turn, but first the genesis, let there be light. The modern autonomous university traces its roots to the University of Bologna (1088), University of Paris (1150), University of Oxford (1167), and University of Modena (1175). Those followed the sixth century Christian cathedral schools and the Islamic Al-Azhar University (975), which emphasized the scholarly studies of their respective religions. Today’s universities are institutions of higher education and research that grant academic degrees in a variety of subjects and provide both undergraduate and graduate education. They can be public or private, with a handful of the latter type being for-profit institutes, a neo-circumstance. The word “university” is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which means community of teachers and scholars. Not community of teachers, scholars, and countless vice presidents. Universities are self-regulating guilds that determine the qualifications of their members. The original secular universities were specialized associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters granted by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located. To commemorate the 900 anniversary of founding the University of Bologna—which was the first to adapt an academic charter guaranteeing academic freedom, Constitutio