The University in the American Future
scientific findings, they have moved to erect a scientific establishment in which men from the graduate schools and research institutes of universities play a major role. The grant system through which the efforts of such scientists have been purchased, supported, and rewarded has put emotional strains upon the integrity of universities as social systems. Various internal strains have increased-strains between undergraduate education, graduate training, and research, strains between the sciences and the humanities, strains between the graduate disciplines and the applied schools and extension services. And, as the university has acquiesced more or less uncritically in the benevolences of the grant system, the quest for unifying meanings within our proliferating knowledges and within the processes of their utilization has become more and more neglected and unrewarded. Yet this quest alone can restore a greater measure of integrity to the university. The other principle of selection in Flexner grew out of his conviction that it was the service motivation of the university, the desire of its administration and some members of its faculties to assume responsibility for helping solve the problem of various segments of our segmented society, that threatened the integrity of the university in America. Flexner believed that the university must be at once free, relevant, and irresponsible in its response to social problems in its environment. An extended quotation from Flexner on this point will help both to illuminate his idea of the modern university and to clarify a continuing university dilemma.