Hacker News Reader

Comment by sn41 | Hacker News Reader

There is one thing that my friend's father said to me once, about these analogies between universities and businesses. A typical business lasts in the order of 20-30 years, a couple of generations if lucky. Most famous universities have lasted centuries. And these is the western university system, starting with Bologna, Paris and Oxford after 1000 AD. If you expand the definition of a university slightly broader, you find the famous universities of Sankore, Baghdad, around 800 AD (the syllabus included Aristotle and Euclid), and even before that, Nalanda and Taxila from around 300 BC-1000 AD, and Alexandria from the Egyptian times.

A university is a slow moving, lumbering beast. But analyses like these are too shallow to understand why it has lasted so long, and why every place that was once a centre of human civilisation also had a great university.

View on HN

This. Several years ago, I sat through a panel (at a university) in which representatives from various businesses tried to lecture a bunch of academics about how the university is a hidebound institution, and that if doesn't "get with the times" it will be crushed by the new technological world order.

I recall noting that "the university" had not only outlasted any particular firm they could name, but had indeed survived the rise and fall of empires. I also noted the irony of being lectured by a representative from Big Blue about one's inability to "pivot."

"The university" is a remarkably resilient institution. That doesn't make it a good institution, but we should pause before we analyze them with the kind of narrow-minded presentism we see in this post. Universities have survived these many centuries not because they refuse to change, but because they're better at changing than even the nation states that have supported them.

I think it's important to note that many institutions have technically persisted and adapted without really staying competitive. Catholic monasteries, for example, have almost none of the respect and power they used to enjoy. I have no doubt universities will still exist centuries from now - but will they exist as dynamic centers of intellect, or archaic live-in social clubs?

> I think it's important to note that many institutions have technically persisted and adapted without really staying competitive.

This will go ignored by most, for they are too caught up in the respect and power they enjoy now from their associations (or those they hope to gain by joining such ranks) to not realize that its slowly seeping away at best, and not strictly to individual states or corporate institutions, and that full "handover" of power is a slow process that can span generations with occasional jumps within any given one.

It's resources are being siphoned to build anew, like the church's before it.

You are right, the past may not indicate the future. In any case, mass higher education is a new thing, probably only from the late 19th century. It may also happen that the scale of university education will go down, while universities survive.

Nicely put. The title might be intentionally clickbaity, but it’s should strongly remind us of Chesterton’s fence.

I can imagine many alternatives that might appear better than universities in today’s world with contemporary assumptions, but it is totally unclear whether any of them (especially VC-funded startups) might survive over significant timescales (minimum one century) — protecting human knowledge and hosting a fecund environment for the human intellect. Universities are conservative almost by design (and I don’t mean politics), and that’s what has helped them survive so long in symbiosis with increasing knowledge and changing social mores. Historically, they have been very good at adapting (slowly), unlike modern businesses which are so rigid that their trajectory typically involves getting killed/consumed by an upstart in a matter of decades. To the extent that universities have serious problems, a lot of can be traced to trying to run them like businesses.

Wow, I've never thought about it this way. This article and comment have almost completely changed the way I think about universities. I really enjoy the idea that universities are culture engines, I think that is true in so many ways.

Agree, there is a lot to unpack around universities. I definitely don’t think they are beyond criticism. That being said they are one of the only non-conditional long term organizations one can be associated with as an adult(alumni).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com