The book, expanding upon the Rhodes lectures Flexner had delivered at Oxford in 1928, gave a depressing account of higher education in America, concluding with a call for “the outright creation of a school or institute of higher learning” where “mature persons, animated by intellectual purposes, must be left to pursue their own ends in their own way … be they college graduates or not.” Flexner argued that this “free society of scholars” should be governed by scholars and scientists, not administrators, and even “the term ‘organization’ should be banned.”
