One of the phoniest ideas coming out of the learning profession has to be the idea of the "corporate university." I'm OK with "academy," "Institute," "Center of excellence", but "University"? Give me a break! Are you awarding degrees and conducting research? No, you're teaching employees to use Office 2007 and improve their project management skills. The corporate learning function is about professional skills development. It has more in common with training auto mechanics or piano players, than with awarding Ph.D. degrees in sociology. But I guess a "corporate community college" or "corporate trade school" didn't sound sexy enough?

Besides, do you really want to model your organization on a university? I worked for one. I was on the faculty of University of Colorado for three years. I couldn't stand it. It was a place full of self-aggrandizing professors working in the most vicious backstabbing culture, mired in 1600 century conventions ("it's May, so we must send the students back to their farms for four months"). In fact, smart universities are trying to become more like companies, recognizing that their students and their future employers are indeed their customers. So why on earth would any clear thinking company want to go the opposite direction and model themselves on a university?

"Corporate universities" are typically accompanied by expensive bricks and mortar conference centers, class rooms, sometimes even hotels, faculty, courses, classes and curriculum. All of which are a throwback to failed practices of separating learning from work and wasting money and carbon footprint on herding people away from work into the dreaded class rooms where information is thrown at them out of context. Let's blow up that little red school house and begin developing learning that is embedded into actual work process instead.