The Innovative University

Chapter 23New DNA

The things we've seen in our exploration of higher education's past and current competitive realities indicate the need for most traditional universities to genetically reengineer themselves. In the roughly seventy-five years during which Charles Eliot, A. Lawrence Lowell, and James Conant presided over Harvard, its DNA was set. Since the 1950s, when Conant left to help in the reconstruction of Germany, that DNA has remained largely unaltered, even as it has been widely copied. Universities have grown larger, more complex, and more expensive, but their basic character still reflects decisions made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The times now require additional evolutionary adaptation. Because of the ...