multiversity Chiefly U.S.
(mʌltɪˈvɜːsɪtɪ)
[f. multi- + university n.]
A very large university comprising many different departments and activities.
| 1963 C. Kerr Uses of University i. 42 The multiversity is in the main stream of events. To the teacher and the researcher have been added the consultant and the administrator. Teaching is less central than it once was for most faculty members; research has become more important. 1966 Economist 14 May 713/1 For the second year in succession Dr Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, has been bitterly attacked for permitting too much freedom by a subcommittee of the State Legislature, which finances this great, sprawling ‘multi-versity’. 1968 Guardian 30 Nov. 2/3 The inevitable transformation of universities everywhere into ‘multi⁓versities’ is being achieved with appalling birth pangs in the University of California, which a dozen years ago had two campuses and now has 10. 1969 C. Davidson in Cockburn & Blackburn Student Power 337 Transforming the academic landscape into what we now call the ‘multi⁓versity’. 1969 Nature 13 Dec. 1064/1 By the mid-sixties, the result..was clearly an overloading of the university system as a ‘multiversity’, to use the word of one of its first victims, Clark Kerr. 1971 Wall Street Jrnl. 12 Jan. 1/1 They don't like the way it has grown from a sleepy teachers' college of 3,000 students in 1950 to its present status as a giant, cosmopolitan ‘multiversity’. |