The University: Coordinating Knowledge Across Generations

The university is the institution most directly ancestral to what Providence is attempting, and its failures are therefore the most instructive. The combination of apprenticeship and peer review produced a system for the accumulation of reliable knowledge that has no historical precedent.

What it broke was the integration of knowledge. The university that produced Dante — who could hold theology, philosophy, astronomy, politics, and poetry in a single coherent vision — has been replaced by a university that produces specialists who cannot speak to each other across disciplinary boundaries. Climate change requires the simultaneous integration of atmospheric physics, ecology, economics, political science, ethics, engineering, and indigenous knowledge. No university department studies it. Several dozen departments study fragments of it. The second failure is the university's progressive capture by market logic — the transformation of knowledge from a commons to a commodity.

What must be preserved: the apprenticeship model, the peer review commitment to honest challenge, the understanding that knowledge requires sustained communities of practice across generations.