The “function” of universities

via Crooked Timber Frank Kofsky in his bookJohn Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s:

….the university is in some ways a microcosm of the Establishment as a whole. As we now know from studies that appeared as the by-product of protest movements at campuses all over the country during the second half of the 1960s, universities are governed by boards of regents, trustees, et cetera, on which sit representatives of the dominant business groups in the community.26 In a general way, the curriculum of the university is shaped to the demands of this corporate elite for an institution that will mass-produce mid-level technicians with all the approved social attitudes….