Perhaps the issue is that universities in the 20th-21st centuries have been trying to do two things at once, and are doing both of them badly: one, they are sup

Perhaps the issue is that universities in the 20th-21st centuries have been trying to do two things at once, and are doing both of them badly: one, they are supposed to reproduce elite western culture (whoops), and two, they are supposed to be preprofessional finishing programs for doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, professors, and business executives. They do not do the first properly (and since the 1960s cannot even agree on what it means), and they mostly fob off the second to graduate schools and corporate training programs. So, the substance of the preprofessional training has devolved into an empty pile of credits that cost far too much money and time. At each stage in the chain, the schools blame the lower schools for failing to prepare students properly, and use that as an excuse to dilute standards further, which then causes more problems for the next stage in the chain. This has reached something close to its end point now. They can only reduce standards so much more now until all students are illiterates grunting prompts into chatbots. As to the first role, for example, the Byzantines in their universities focused on reproducing some combination of Christian orthodoxy and the Greco-Roman heritage of philosophy and history. They just taught the same curriculum over and over and over again without much modification (albeit with a lot of lurching back and forth between iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm) for roughly a millennium. Since the 60s, the permanent cultural revolution makes it so that every micro generation of professors has a new revolutionary program that it imposes, which is then followed by a new revolutionary program against the old revolution and so on and so forth. Universities are fundamentally conservative (with a small c), which has generated a very funny situation in which they have become totally dedicated to conserving the institution of permanent cultural revolution without any content. They have become dedicated to the procedure of cultural revolution, but no one can agree on the substance and content of that revolution.