Chapter 11: Time, the University, and Stratification: The Historical Making of Institutional Time as a Strategic Resource

In research on higher education, the relationship between time and stratification has been often framed in the following anecdote. According to Philipp Altbach (2003), in the late nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller asked the then president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, what it would take to found a Harvard equivalent. The answer was: 50 million dollars and 200 years. While there is no factual evidence for this anecdote,¹ it proliferates through the higher education community as an indication of what a university needs to do to become “world class” (cf. Salmi, 2009, p. 36): money progressed through a linear timeframe of 200 years.