The Universities and the American Crisis

It’s been obvious for decades that both our K-12 schools and our colleges and universities are overmatched by the magnitude of our moment—from the disruption of work and community by amazing but frightening technologies, and also from the neglect of our shared civic inheritance, perhaps wrought by our affluence and our ease. But the particular challenges of the last several years have revealed in much sharper detail the hollowness of our educational institutions. Our once great universities have been exposed as emperors without clothes. At present, the sole ticket to teaching the next generation is having written a jargon-filled dissertation read by no more than a few dozen people in an increasingly rarified field. And it’s evident to increasing numbers of Americans that such a system is absurd.