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.