Faculty were tightly bound to the core of the university like electrons around the nucleus. Expertise is king, so to produce world class research you need a collection of world class experts often in multiple disciplines, and often requiring more talent than any single university can assemble. Research will therefore increasingly be conducted in multidisciplinary teams, composed of faculty not only from within a university, but from multiple universities. Faculty will be shared between universities like electrons loosely bound to the nucleus. A research team composed of faculty from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard were recently awarded an NSF Center grant in surgical robotics.
Several corporations are also collaborators on the project.
They caved in to the need for expertise. Conversely, we see faculty, for example, who may teach fall semester at Johns Hopkins, spring semester at College Park and spend the summer conducting research in Australia. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to faculty affiliations in the new quantum physics model of higher education. But universities have already begun moving away from lifetime contracts by hiring more and more non-tenured faculty. While the faculty view tenure as key to their success, the public looks at it with great skepticism.