[Carry_Okie]

For all the BS leftists offer about "equality," a university is the most stratified place on the planet. Just look at the arrangement of parking places, with dedicated stalls for every level of the hierarchy, from president, to faculty, to car-pools, to zero emissions vehicles...

It's insane.

[nathanbedford]

I am just now reading "The Education of Henry Adams" for the first time. Published in 1904, it has been proclaimed the greatest book of the century. Hyperbolic as that might be, it is clear that the ills complained of by Adams respecting our educational establishment have only metastasized over the succeeding century.

If our educational institutions fail us, ultimately our culture, our civilization, and our Republican experiment fails.

When I went to school 50 years ago it was considered necessary for students to come together almost in the style of a medieval cloister to rub elbows and sit at the knees of scholars. The intimacy was thought to be indispensable hence the necessity for a "place" of learning, an assumption that goes back to the Middle Ages and even into Greece. Perhaps the Times they are a changing and technology will succeed in reforming an institution which is becoming as stratified as it was in the Middle Ages. There is really no need now to go to a classroom to hear a canned lecture when it is or should be available to all on the Internet, as MIT has done with its curriculum. TTC has put innumerable lectures on audio and videotape in virtually every discipline. There is no need to cloister among the vines of Ivy to see or hear them. Peer review is as easily accomplished through the Internet as by the distribution of mimeograph as was done in my day.

Yes, the times they are a changing and the guild system of our universities must somehow give way.