The University as Leader and Laggard
T NHE world lags behind the university, and the university lags behind the world. The university is ahead in research, but scholars in the university are better at advancing knowledge than at making it current in the world or even among their colleagues. The representative of an agricultural-extension service carrying the word to the farms of the state was told by a busy and impatient farmer, "Sonny, I don't farm half as good as I know how right now." But it is too easy to feel superior to the legendary rustic. Members of the faculty of medicine do not themselves practice medicine as well as they know how right now, and next month they will know how still better, without having changed their practice. The practice of medicine outside the medical schools and other centers of medical research lags much farther behind. In chemistry, physics, and engineering, in the newly applied science of astronomy, and in other scientific and technical areas, the knowledge of the study and the laboratory is soon exploited by industry and the military, but the findings of the research scientist, and especially their applications, are nevertheless often obsolete almost before they are put into practice in the factory or the field. The techniques of storing and retrieving information developed in research-oriented schools of library science and in industrialand govern-