by Derek Bok, The Huffington Post, September 3, 2013
In Francis Cornford's satire, Microcosmographia Academica (1908), the dons in Great Britain dismiss a proposal to change traditional practices at their college because "Nothing should ever be tried for the first time." This principle, the late Irving Kristol once claimed, applied to higher education in the United States as well. "With the possible exception of the post office," Kristol wrote, the university has been "the least inventive (or even adaptive) of our social institutions since World War II."
