问答题

In the past, American colleges and universities were created to serve a dual purpose—to advance learning and to offer a chance to become familiar with bodies of knowledge already discovered to those who wished it. To create and to impart, these were the hallmarks of American higher education prior to the most recent, tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. (71)The successful institution of higher learning had never been one whose mission could be defined in terms of providing vocational skills or as a strategy for resolving societal problems. In a subtle way Americans believed postsecondary education to be useful, but not necessarily of immediate use. What the students obtained in college became beneficial in later life—residually, without direct application in the period after graduation.
(72)One need only be reminded of the change in language describing the two-year college to appreciate the new value currently being attached to the concept of a service-related university. The traditional two-year college has shed its pejorative "junior" college label and is generally called a "community" college, a clearly valueladen expression representing the latest commitment in higher education. (73)Even the doctoral degrees long recognized as a required "union card" in the academic worlds has come under severe criticism as the pursuit of learning for its own sake and the accumulation of knowledge without immediate application to a professor’s classroom duties. The idea of a college or university that performs a triple function—communicating knowledge to students, expanding the content of various disciplines, and interacting in a direct relationship with the society—has been the most important change in higher education in recent years.
This novel development is often overlooked. Educators have always been familiar with those parts of the two-year college curriculum that have a "service" or vocational orientation. (74) Knowing this, otherwise perceptive commentaries on American postsecondary education underplay the impact of the attempt of colleges and universities to relate to, if not resolves the problems of the society. Whether the subject under review is student unrest, faculty tenure, the nature of the curriculum, the onset of collective bargaining, or the growth of collegiate bureaucracies, in each instance the thrust of these discussions obscures the larger meaning of the emergence of the service-university in American higher education. Even the highly regarded critique of Clark Kerr, currently head of the Carnegie Foundation, which set the parameters of academic debate around the evolution of the so-called "multiversity", failed to take account of this phenomenon and the manner in which its fulfillment changed the scope of higher education. To the extent that the idea of "multiversity" centered on matters of scale—how big is too big How complex is too complex —it obscured the fundamental question posed by the service-university: what is higher education supposed to do (75)Unless the commitment to what Samuel Gould has properly called the "communiversity" is clearly articulated, the success of any college or university in achieving its service-education functions will be effectively impaired.