An awesome thought

I have recently started reading the book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership by Steven Sample, the President of the University of Southern California (USC). More about that when I've finished reading it, but for now, I was led to look him up on the USC website and found an interesting article that he wrote in 2003. What blew me away was the following paragraph:

[University leaders] must understand that the decisions they make today are made for the long term. In his book The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr observed that since the year 1520 only about 85 institutions have remained continuously in existence in recognizable forms. They include several Swiss cantons, the Roman Catholic Church, and the parliaments of the Isle of Man, Iceland, and Great Britain. But some 70 of the 85 institutions that have survived continuously for the past half-millennium are universities. So when [university leaders] consider their role, they should think in terms of centuries.

That's an interesting and challenging perspective to try to grasp for anyone who works in a university.