WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF A UNIVERSITY?

 

                 WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF A UNIVERSITY?

  This is how Drew Gilpin Faust,60, Harvard University’s first woman president, answers this question.  “The essence of a university is that it is uniquely accountable to the past and to the future --- not simply or even primarily to the present .  Ms Faust who is a Civil War historian and the former head of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at the university, says: “A university is not about results in the next quarter.  It is not even about who a student has become by graduation.  It is about learning moulds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia, learning that shapes the future.  Ms. Faults a Federal Commission on the future of Higher Education empanelled by the Bush administration for its focus on training a competitive work force for the global economy.  She holds while higher education makes a fundamental contribution to training a work force, it should strive to be far more than that.  Repeating the words of W.E.B.Dubois, she says: “Education is not to make men carpenters, so much as to make carpenters men.”  Faust looks at universities as stewards of living tradition and as places for philosophers as well as scientists, where learning and knowledge are pursued in part because they define what has over centuries made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness.  According to Faust those who long for a lost golden age of higher education should think about the very limited population that alleged utopia actually served.  “College used to be restricted to a tiny elite; now it serves the many, not just the few.”