In other cultures universities are self-governing bodies with a minimum of state supervision except in fascist or Communist countries. If by a university one means primarily a group of scholarly experts, no American university is self-governing. The faculty are employees. Few boards of trustees or regents admit a representative or representatives of the faculty regularly as members of the board, and many do not admit a representative of the faculty to be present at their meetings except in unusual circumstances. Few include the president as a member. The president is usually the agent of the board as well as the only agent of lawful communication between the body of scholars and the nonacademic board. The situation is further complicated by the fact that nowadays the American university president is usually chosen either for his name value or his presumed managerial potentiality. If he has been a scholar, he gives up that profession.

No American university faculty is empowered either to choose a president or to depose him; and though faculty members may be formally or informally consulted by members of the board when a new president is to be chosen, the board is under no obligation to accept the recommendation of the faculty or a committee thereof, these recommendations being in fact often ignored or overruled. Most of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth has been spent in working out a proper modus vivendi between a nonprofessional board, members of which incline to look upon the university as an odd sort of baffling business enterprise, and the body of professional scholars, who, unlike their European counterparts, have little or no responsibility for the financing of the university.
In older American institutions, public or private, a long record of trial and error has resulted in rough definitions and limitations of responsibility. In such universities the board is now commonly content to leave the courses, the modes of teaching, the direction to be taken by research, and the granting of degrees to the president, his academic aides (the deans of the several faculties or colleges making up the university), and the faculty. The vexed question of university finance, which necessarily determines academic policies, lies in a sort of undistributed middle that involves investments, appropriations, salaries, government contracts, fees, fellowships, promotions, and so on. Obviously the financial situation profoundly affects the nature of any university. Obviously the faculty has, at best, only an indirect, sometimes only a remote, relation to financial policy. A board may be so negligent as to permit a university president to bankrupt his institution; or it may be so fussily intrusive as to enforce standards and values that have more relation to popular trends than to the pursuit of truth and excellence.
Since all legal authority rests in the board, its members may abolish or alter parts of a university or invent new ones with or without the knowledge or consent of the faculty. With or without the advice of the faculty the board may also promulgate rules governing the lives of students and of faculty members that may or may not be consonant with the real purpose of the institution. Of course, with experience, boards tend to leave this sort of thing more and more to the “administration,”but the recent turmoil at Berkeley illustrates the confusion that results when the distribution of responsibility among the board, the administration, the faculty, and the students is not clear.
THE American university is further distinguished from its Old World counterpart by a confusion of aims and responsibility between undergraduate (and vocational) and graduate (and professional) education. The American college of arts and sciences is unique in the world. American graduate schools developed out of existing colleges of arts and sciences in this country late in our educational history. The graduate school of arts and sciences therefore did not, like a law school or a medical school, come into being for a unitary purpose. Indeed, in one sense there is no graduate school of arts and sciences but only departments that offer graduate work. The common denominator that makes the concept of a graduate school of arts and sciences possible is a mild uniformity in entrance requirements for graduate work (the entrant must have a bachelor’s degree) and an equally mild uniformity about the mode of granting advanced degrees — the M.A. and the Ph.D. A dean of a law school heads a professional body devoted to teaching law; a dean of a graduate school of arts and sciences heads ten, twenty, thirty, forty separate professional units, part of whose time is devoted to teaching students not in the graduate school and part of whose time is devoted to teaching graduate courses. Without a graduate school there can be no university, but the graduate school of arts and sciences rests upon the unstable foundation of shifting departmental interests as the school of medicine does not.
In creating Cornell University, the founder said he wanted to establish an institution in which anybody could study anything. This dictum has been widely accepted as a sound definition of university work. Consequently, television programs sending out news broadcasts, information, and domestic science courses for future housewives, the teaching of advertising layouts and the training of future football coaches, “short course” instruction in agriculture, and adult education classes for retired businessmen are offered by the “university" along with advanced research in atomic physics, abstruse work in higher mathematics, chemical studies of the sun’s corona, metaphysical speculation about the nature of metaphysical speculation, and a seminar in the economic background of the First Crusade. This need not obscure, but in most cases it certainly straitens, the pure idea of a university as a house of intellect. Goodwill is one of the obscuring forces in academic life.