Will the 'University' Survive the 21st Century?
Darwin changed the way we think about the world. Before Darwin, there was God who created the world and the Man in his own image; everything existed with a purpose, and for that end alone. Darwin, almost boringly, offered us another vision: Of a complex, natural process, grinding on for million years, producing a great variety of life forms without a knowable purpose. The Man was no longer special after that, just an evolved animal with greater mental ability. However, the most profound impact of Darwin is perhaps in debunking 'teleological' reasoning, that species existed for a preordained purpose, and replacing this with less grandiose, almost boring, and perhaps even frightening, logic of evolution. However, most conversations about universities (particularly in the West) are defined by a teleological reasoning, that the universities exist for a preordained purpose, quite outside the social requirements of the day. Rooted perhaps in the defining treatise about the univ...