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Sat 04 Apr 2007Universities are becoming places of restricted learningCultureShock:The current short-sighted trend of treating our third-level institutions as if they were businesses is causing a narrowing of intellectual diversityOne of the concepts that the environmental movement has successfully driven into our collective consciousness is biodiversity. The idea suggests that the health of the planet can be judged not simply by the amount of life it supports but also by the variety and multiplicity of that life. Since life is a system in which everything is connected, the extinction of any one life form, even if it is a toad or a gnat, has consequences for all the others. And we have to be humble enough to accept that we may not know what those consequences are.