What Is a University? Part IV

When we look at the signs that a university has turned into a business or is a state agent, it’s easy to overlook the fact there is nothing in the legal structure of universities that makes them for-profit firms or even official arms of government. Surely they set out to be neither, and I suspect that most would not take gladly to being called either.  And while I have always felt that during most of the 20^th century universities have been some of the least strategic entities on the planet, that doesn’t mean that certain aspects of its makeup were not facilitative, indeed even responsible, for the way it operates today. Or for the situation in which it finds itself. It is not enough to simply describe the various things that universities do as, say, being a multiversity; that descriptive or phenomenological view is just a snapshot, and tends toward a view that the components are fixed (or unfixable). We want instead to understand what those components mean or imply, and what that suggests for its institutional design and options.