Bibliographic record
Abstract
George Fallis' examination of the plight of the large, Anglo-American, research-intensive universities has recently been reprinted in paperback making it more accessible to many of us who should be reading it.As Fallis notes, most of us in the academic community are "remarkably poorly read" about what is driving the world of the multiversity and what lies in store for us.In Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, he sets out what he takes to be the most salient ideas that have shaped universities over time and then posits five characteristics of our age that are transforming the multiversity.His cri de coeur is that the emerging idea of the multiversity as an explicit service to the economy will so radically change the function of the multiversity that its critical function as an institution of democracy will wither.As members of the academy, whether as presidents, provosts, deans, or faculty members, we share the responsibility for ensuring that doesn't happen.Five years after it was first published, the book is still essential reading, though not all of us will find all parts of it of equal interest.Fallis's history of various ideas of universities that have been at play over the years, though, is helpful in understanding the tension between the teaching (particularly undergraduate teaching) and research functions that causes so much stress for us both individually and institutionally today.It also helps us understand why we should all care about the plight of the social sciences and humanities, whether we are in arts, science, or professional faculties.However, our interest in his discussions of the five characteristics of our age that he is most worried about-the constrained welfare state, information technology, postmodernism, globalization, and commercialization of research-will vary, depending on how much we already know about these issues.In skimming through these sections, it is important not to miss his real point: to expose the impact those forces have been having on our universities.What makes his analysis compelling reading, though, is his conclusion that we need to make serving democracy an explicit part of the multiversity's mission and his subsequent discussion of the implications for us as academics if that were to happen.While Fallis is disinclined to present the alternative as a "doom and gloom" scenario, he is gravely concerned that something fundamental is threatening to transform the multiuniversity and its role in society, that it is suffering a drift in mission toward becoming an instrument of the economy, putting our inheritance at risk.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".