Universities = Country Clubs ?

In a commentary published in The Independent last year, Mr Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics (LSE), recounted how he had asked former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers for his view on remote campuses.

Professor Summers replied with a question: 'Why is it that, in the United States, health clubs are typically franchised operations, while country clubs are not?'

He then supplied the answer: 'Customers go to health clubs for the equipment, but to country clubs for the people they hope to meet.'

Universities, he concluded, are country clubs, not health clubs.

Reflecting on this, Mr Davies decided that it would not be easy to replicate LSE's London campus because 'a community of scholars cannot be uprooted and transplanted or replicated at will'.

I wonder how many university vice-chancellors and presidents still regard their institutions as, essentially, communities of scholars?

That was after all the original meaning of the term 'university', derived from the Latin phrase 'universitas magistrorum et scholarium', roughly meaning 'community of masters and scholars'.

Here, the word 'scholars' does not mean 'experts or scholarship holders' but simply 'those who learn, from the masters or teachers'.

So the earliest sense of a university was as a community of people who teach and learn. It was this community that made a university, not the soaring towers, ivory or otherwise, which adorned some campuses.

And those who went to universities went not for the equipment, but for the people they hoped to learn from and with.

----- The above is part of the article "When students are no longer a uni's top priority" by Lydia Lim in the Straits Times dated 1 June 2007.