University Structure Quotes

The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one cannot really amend.

We conclude that, simultaneously with the organization of the colleges, there should be at Santa Cruz an organization by disciplines, whose units would have a voice in appointments and promotions, in course of programs, and in the allocation of funds for research.

Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities.

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.

Very few parents keep up with who the top professors are or whose classes their kids are taking, partially because most undergraduates interact more commonly with graduate students.

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.

The role of a liberal arts college within a university is to be a genuine part of that university, giving and responding to the other parts.

Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.