The complaints about the university system today are starting to sound a whole lot like the complaints about the mainstream media just as they started to go South. The following from Seth Godin's blog today:
The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.
The refusal of the current system to embrace what the new technologies make possible is probably only a symptom of a deeper problem--that they are primarily concerned with their own interests as a class, and not in the customer. There is no ethic of service here. But the new technology both demonstrates this, and makes them suddenly vulnerable. It opens up what used to be a cartel, and it makes anyone who will use the technology automatically more competitive than they (we) are.
You'd think that university professors at least would be smart enough to learn the lesson, especially after the manufacturing unions and the press have already gone down, and other professions are starting to be outsourced. But so far, it doesn't look like it. Perhaps that, in the end, is the ultimate condemnation.
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