Sadly, I cannot yet link to it, but if you have a subscription already or are in reasonable vicinity of a library or bookstore, I recommend you take a look at Anthony Grafton’s article in the latest (April 8th) New York Review of Books, “Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities“. Here’s a sample quote:
Universities become great by investing for the long term. You choose the best scholars and teachers you can and give them the resources and the time to think problems through. Sometimes a lecturer turns out to be Malcolm Bradbury’s fluent, shallow, vicious History Man; sometimes he or she turns out to be Michael Baxandall. No one knows quite why this happens. We do know, though, that turning the university into The Office will produce a lot more History Men than scholars such as Baxandall.
Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.
All in all, very much in line with some recent conversations here, and reflective of several of our experiences.
An und für sich 