The first university, the University of Bologna, always seems like the ideal to me. It was a guild, or what we might today call a trade union, of local tutors,

The first university, the University of Bologna, always seems like the ideal to me. It was a guild, or what we might today call a trade union, of local tutors, who colluded together to regulate prices and amount of time spent teaching for their own benefit. Out of this emerged the modern concept of the research university, because having colluded on acceptable prices and labor limits, the professors then had amply ability to work on whatever problems they wanted to. And being smart people they started to work on unsolved problems, began traveling across Europe and helping similar institutions, and collaborating across the continent in Latin. Fundamentally this seems the best approach, the professor-centered one. The professors who are extremely knowledgable in a single field exchange some of their time to undergraduates who provide them with enough money so that they can continue learning about their specific field. This professor-undergraduate relationship is mutually beneficial, and also aids society by increasing the number of experts in the world. Things begin to deteriorate when other influences such as administrators, real estate agents, financiers, donors, politicians, and so on get in the mix, because their goals are oftentimes only tangentially related to increasing the total amount of knowledge in the world.