What will become of the universities here? When did we stop respecting study, research, intellectual inquiry? I’ll bet that if we started a school for fame our registration would shoot up and we’d started getting some of the money the government owes us back again. Not talent but fame.
Or maybe a school for how to make money. But of course the example of the university doesn’t really allow it to draw crowds in that area.
I heard one suggestion for raising money for the university today that beats all of the others for its metaphoric truth – turn part of it into a cemetery and sell plots. Professors can get buried for free.
All this kvetching is connected of course to the sudden ‘resignation’ of the only president I ever encountered in the university who was a mensch, a gentleman and a scholar. For years the power of the faculty has been eroding and the interests of the university have been becoming purely financial – a very dangerous thing when it comes to education. And Zvi Galil put the old-fashioned academic goals first.
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