The University…once was an integrated community…It had a single purpose. The conversation was in common…The campus has evolved consistently with society. It has been pulled outward to society and pulled to pieces internally. The campus consistent with society has served as a good introduction to society – to bigness, to specialization, to diffusion of interests…The University and segments of industry are becoming more and more alike. As the University becomes tied to the world of work, the professor – at least in the natural and some of the social sciences – takes on the characteristics of an entrepreneur….The two worlds are merging physically…(The University) is a mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money.
-Clark Kerr, former President of the University of California quoted in The Center Magazine, January, 1968
The University has been molded by current powers and we have been formed and malformed in our turn. The alienation of society has become our apathy and fragmentation; its anti-intellectualism and glorification of technology, our play at neutralism is an inversion of ends and means; its crude devotion to wealth and power, our imbalance and intellectual prostitution….The University is at this moment an ideological institution, a mask for systematic dominance and privilege. A free and human community of scholars can only flourish when the multitudinous communities of the exploited, the wretched, and the brutalized peoples of the earth have broken the bonds of their subservience and established themselves as men of full stature. To participate in the projection and the making of that world is the responsibility of the intellectual.
-Richard Lichtman, quoted from “The University: Mask for Privilege?” in Philosophy for a New Generation, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1973