The undoing of the university: modern intellectual misery and Gilbert Chesterton's creed of limits

[Extract] What a mess universities are in today. If they are not doomed, then they are most certainly broken. It is difficult to overstate just how wretched the condition of the contemporary university is. This is a desolation that is not a consequence of failure, but of success. The universities are the victim of their own success. Since the 1970s universities across the OECD and elsewhere have grown massively in relation to the population of their home nations. The proportion of nineteen year olds entering universities has sky-rocketed in the past forty years. As relative numbers have grown, the university contribution to teaching and research has shrunk. The median student learns much less today at university than was the case 20 or 40 years ago. Most students now have only a passing acquaintance with a core university curriculum. The median academic today produces less research per annum, and visibly less research of high quality. The size of universities has turned them into bureaucratic leviathans. Central costs as a proportion of total costs have ballooned across forty years. The keystone of the teaching university, informal contact between teacher and student, has virtually disappeared as teaching academics have been drawn into a vacuous welter of administrative committees, email, documentation and regulation