Filling in the Moat Around the Ivory Tower

Over the past one hundred and fifty years, higher education in America has undergone fundamental changes. After a long emphasis on teaching, the idea of service to society re-oriented higher education in the mid 19th century, highlighted by the creation of the land-grant universities. Then, over the last century and particularly after the Second World War, the focus shifted toward research, and academic subspecialties proliferated. Now the university finds itself with a tri-partite mission and a sprawling accumulation of autonomous units — a multiversity — with no deeper forces of integration guiding its evolution. The splintered forms of inquiry we have inherited from the past do not always serve well a world in which complex problems are not neatly packaged according to academic disciplines.