The corporate university model of education that strives mainly to teach super-specific skills and thus ensure career placement is replacing the traditional university, which taught how to learn rather than what to know.

Those of the corporate model argue that, with research, rising costs and distance learning playing an increasing role in a 21st century college education, those tenure-track professors only represent a threat to the success of the notion of modern college as a place for leisure and enjoyment over academics and study.

After all, they argue, if polling indicates that most students expect a “college experience” featuring booze and babes with a curriculum that isn’t too demanding, then replacing most professors with graduate students and teaching assistants would only be to meet the demands of the market, right?

The problem, as Jon Stewart pointed out last week on The Daily Show, is that there’s also “a market for cocaine and hookers.”

In other words, a good college must focus on soberly constructing and executing a robust academic mission, not indulge itself on market studies that would justify a luxury campus that spends the majority of its time building up its image as a four year resort style get-a-way.

And we desperately need real professors of high caliber for real colleges and universities to survive, teaching a foundational sort of learning that can help students discover their inner statesmen and philosopher instead of merely the salesman or paper-pusher.

The humanities can provide such a foundation for student scholarship; indeed, it is perhaps the only realm of study that can. For the humanities, after all, is the study of the human condition.

Only with the knowledge that the humanities provide, and the professors who pass its wealth along, can we understand ourselves and our place in the long history of mankind.

This kind of learning, that emphasized the importance of language and literature, history and philosophy, arts and religion, is so much of what distinguished higher education, making it unique from the trade schools that taught specifically for a particular job or career.

The college campus that prizes a big box education and finds no need for small classes led by articulate, passionate, soulful professors is one that by definition cannot satisfy over the long term the fundamental whispers of mankind’s inner quest for truth and wisdom.

The bix box university can only stare blankly, dimly aware of its deficiency, at the ancient Greek appeal: “Know Thyself.” The big box resort campus has forgotten its two most valuable assets – the professor and the student – and with it, the memory that it will always be the soul that connects the two on a real, living campus.

The college of 2009, though, is very unlike the idea of the campus that lives in the minds of so many of the mothers and fathers sentimentally sending their children away to campus. It would come as a something of a shock, I think, for them to learn that tenured and tenure-track professors represent only 35 percent of today’s faculty.

There will come a day when our society needs to rediscover its basic principles and purpose, and the college campus, always overflowing with young minds, will be uniquely situated to help navigate a path forward, toward an education that doesn’t seek merely to inform, but to enlighten and genuinely empower.

In the mean time, the campuses of America may soon grow darker as the last professors die off or depart, extinguishing a flame that burned brightly for centuries. Even as the fire goes out, though, the young people, the fuel for the campus in the first place, are only growing in number.

One day, likely in a time of crisis, the young will realize what great heritage that has been lost, and this spark of comprehension will ignite a fire that transforms the college campus with new meaning and purpose, making old things new again.

At most colleges and universities, the extracurricular experience is as strictly regulated (if not more so) than in-class academic time.

If the primary function of the university is academic scholarship, it strikes one as rather odd, indeed, almost perverse, that the life of the student outside of the classroom is as heavily regulated as it is on the modern campus.

The “other half” of a college education, that half that took place outside of the classroom that John Henry Cardinal Newman described as so vital, can only happen organically and naturally among students in peer-to-peer settings.

On today’s campus, though, students are trained in the thinking that they can only engage and enliven themselves through participation in clubs, events and programming that the office of student life prescribes.

The concept of the student leader has devolved from undergrads as definers of societal standards and college customs to mere union leaders, bargaining with college staffers for better goods and services.

In other words, it’s through the commonly accepted avenues of power in modern academia that administrators wield their authority to wade into even the most minor aspects of campus life.

This involvement impacts everything from student traditions they might deem harmful to the college’s public image to academic policies proscribed for their lack of perceived inclusiveness for all viewpoints.

As a result of this redefining of student leadership and the loss of the idea of a cohesive student body, the university has been castrated, its meaning debauched to education merely for one’s first job rather than for a lifetime of learning.

I should caution: administrators are not entirely to blame for our predicament. In the 1960s, many of the student instigators in the campus riots of that era demanded academic change, changes to residential life, and new models for student power.

In seeking power over fundamental college standards like academics, they quite often demanded the very kind of centralization that played right into the hands of administrative centralizers.

I believe that most young people, and many of their parents, would prefer the classical model of the university as a beacon of intellectual pluralism and vibrant student experience over the modern soulless the university, which is dominated by ideological purity and centrally managed and operated activities.

A place where the life of the university is treated as much as an exercise in consumer services as it is a place for endless power grabs by student leaders and control by administration is not a formula for a healthy campus.

Student leaders should be reminded of alternatives to the “consumer union” model of leadership. Student leaders can have a substantive, long-term impact on campus by establishing a system of power beyond the reach or sanction of the bureaucracy.

College students founded the fraternity and sorority systems before administrators and student life offices were ever conceived. They sang songs, formed reading societies and sporting groups long before the modern college trained them to first ask, “May I?”

The legal liability revolution may have sparked the need for administrators to strictly regulate what students are permitted to do on campus; today, the undergrad can recreate the “other half” of his education outside of the classroom, off the campus.

A new concept of student empowerment beckons, of student leaders who merit their title by virtue of their relationships to and bonds with their peers and friends, rather than by their proximity to committees endlessly tweak rules and regulations.

This can be accomplished by connecting with local townspeople, businessmen and philanthropists who are interested in underwriting new student ideas and initiatives and by networking with Rotarians and Kiwanians to enrich communities.

In this way, the student entrepreneurs, politicians, poets, researchers, authors, and all those with ambition beyond the imagination of the ordinary man can discover that simple friendship is the kindling that fuels the fire of a life well lived, of men and women well liked, and of a well remembered and beloved college experience.

Thomas A. Shakely is president of The Other Half, a nonprofit for renewal in higher education. He can be reached at tom@tomshakely.com.