Universities are an illusion because they are made of people. Got it.

Kevin Carey:

[T]he real differences exist at the departmental level, or within the classrooms of individual professors, who teach with a great deal of autonomy under the principles of academic freedom. The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”

Carey makes a decent point, but it’s pretty much the same problem that afflicts any organization, firm, or group of people of some size.

Disaggregate all of the things.