I should say more precisely that we built our universities on the Germanic model with our own particularly nasty twist, the added insistence that universities be judged in terms of their productive output. The British model for higher education is based instead on the ideal of disinterested learning, a kind of learning accumulated slowly over time by people who come together in a kinship of learning and attempt to find a transfusion point for learning. The British model for higher education assumes that whatever excellence and purity there is in the university is found in undergraduate colleges. Graduate schools, fields of specialization, are merely outgrowths of the undergraduate, liberal tradition and must not be allowed to gain the ascendancy over it. In the Germanic model, on the other hand, undergraduate education, general education, is a dreary and pale shadow of the specialized disciplines, a kind of kindergarten of the university.
Undergraduates get the drippings or leavings of the table from the graduate schools.
No idea that has ever taken hold in the American university has been more harmful and destructive than this one. The Germanic model, which has created our so-called research universities, has not given us anything out of which we could create a human community of learning. Instead it has given us rigid walls, upward ladders, a confusing array of offerings to students, a forbidding and meaningless collection of beehive segments, a Mandarin snobbery based on specialization, an unhealthy desire to hoard one's subject matter, one's private preserves and achievements. Now, in the British model, so well exemplified by the centuries-old traditions of Oxford and Cambridge, a college is not a collection of specialized departments but a community of individuals. As a new student, when you went to lunch you were never quite sure whether you were sitting next to a somebody or a nobody, a big wheel or a little wheel.