It provides a useful perspective on academic duties and responsibilities as we begin the 21st century. Systems change over time.
Individuals go through transformations and organizations have cycles of growth and decline.
How these are understood depends on where we sit in relation to the events and period or length of time, for these transformations compared to our sense of time. A mayfly, with a life measured in a day, sees a system as stable while the Galapagos turtle might see the same system as undergoing a series of rapid transformations. The metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly is short by human standards, while the demise of the dinosaurs was long, thought just a moment on our geological time charts. That intellectual mendicant soon banded together with others to jointly market and promote their ideas. There are faculty, particularly in the humanities, who lament the shrinking of their domain and the expansion of the sciences and technology.