A comparison is offered between the nature of the educational process in modern universities and classical universities that existed in the XIX and XX centuries. It is shown that the decline in the quality of education in modern universities is largely due to the significantly increased workload (more than 10 times) over the past hundred years, , which greatly complicates the conduct of research by full-time teachers and actually cancels the principles of Humboldt. It is clear that modern information technologies allow a return to the implementation of Humboldt's principles at a qualitatively new level. This can be provided by transition to the organization of educational process in "autocatalytic" mode when the information resources providing educational process are maintained by professional, non-academic staff. In this case, the role of the professorship is refocused on the performance of curatorial functions.