10 - Synthesis

Summary

This is our attempt to put the previous chapters together in a coherent fashion. With that objective, we recapitulate the main arguments and survey the evidence. We begin by delving into the history of the university. Next, we examine evidence pertaining to the university’s effect on social and political attitudes, revisiting Part II of the book. In the third section, we address some of the nuances connected to those findings as well as the mechanisms at work, presented in Part III of the book. The final section takes a wide-angle view of our subject, speculating on the overall impact of universities on societies in the modern era, which we characterize as “soft power.”