Out with the old, in with the new [type of university]

Patrick Chan brought an article to our attention yesterday, “The End of the University”, in which the author makes the case that the type of thing we’ve been seeing the Internet do across the culture (i.e., change news, banking and shopping patterns, while foisting some “creative destruction” on news, banking and shopping institutions) is going to happen to the universities over the coming decades.

That will have some good benefits and bad consequences as well. This morning, Peter Escalante provides a good discussion of this, while characteristically keeping his eye on what that will mean going forward:

The bureaucratic leviathan university will not go down without a fight, but its fate is sealed. But either we take charge of what replaces it, or men for whom nothing is of worth unless it is for sale will. It is up to us to ensure that what replaces the present information-factory has the orderly pursuit of wisdom and learning at its heart, or else the new media of study will be little more than a hall of mirrors in which ignorance beholds its own infinitely diversified image, and cannot ever know it for such.