Abraham Flexner 
Universities [PDF ebook] 
American, English, German

Originally published in 1930. Flexiner’s Universities was the big book on higher education when it was first published in 1930 and continued to be such until the appearance of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ The Higher Learning in America in 1936. Universities continues to be one of the great books in the field more than sixty years later but for quite different reasons now than then.