U N I V E R S I D A D E

The University’s Crisis of Purpose

Excerto de um artigo de Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University

New York Times, 01.09.09

“ Higher education(...)has the responsibility to serve not just as a source of economic growth, but as society’s critic and conscience.
Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.
As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?"

BOM ANO

DE

2010