How to kill the university | thesephist.com

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

We’re caught in this Schelling point, this coordination point for the institutions: How do I know if I should hire you? Will you have a diploma from Harvard? I know it’s not as good as it used to be. I know a Harvard humanities diploma’s probably nonsense at this point, but I don’t have any other credibility metric to filter you and I need to

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What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart peo­ple, arrange to do short one-​​off research projects and sim­u­la­tions, pub­lish papers or cap­ture intel­lec­tual prop­erty quickly and eas­ily, and move on to another con­ver­sa­tion. Quickly. Eas­ily. For a liv­ing. Can’t do that in indus­try. Can’t do that in the Acad­emy. Y

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