Clay Shirky, a writer and professor at NYU, has a thought-provoking article on Higher Education. He points out a critical, but often ignored, problem.

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

He notes that the academy is itself a big part of the problem.

[The Golden Age] been gone ten years more than it lasted, in fact, and in the time since it ended, we’ve done more damage to our institutions, and our students, and our junior colleagues, by trying to preserve it than we would have by trying to adapt.

Read the whole article.