How to kill the university | thesephist.com

Of the many ways universities tie into the fabric of our modern life, I think the most complex, and the most under-appreciated today, is that universities are astonishingly prolific, self-sustaining community factories. The reinvention of the university is inevitable, but a long road stretches ahead, and the job will not be complete until we build ... See more

To kill the university, someone new must beat them at this game. Someone needs to invent a better way to build and grow this super-community of communities.

We are inventing better ways to find a network, in cohort-based education products and professional communities. I think we’re still early in the rise of companies offering many other services in the university “package”, but it’s a matter of time.

The best feature of the four-year research university isn’t career or education or personal development per se, but the ultimate community: a lifelong identity tied to a physical place, with thousands of other people, harboring hundreds of distinct self-sustaining tribes mired in decades and centuries of tradition and stories and identities. The un... See more

The university is an invention – there’s nothing fundamentally inevitable about it. The university is also an object of culture – universities play different roles in society and economy and life in different parts of the world, and at different points in history. The university is arbitrary in this way, but it’s also fundamental to the way the wor... See more

But fundamental as it is, the university is still a human invention, and I still think it can be replaced.