That is the sound of a hammer hitting square on the nail.

s/publishing house/publishing houses/

The foundations of the university are crumbling.
Now we can all get more information and learning than ever before, but we cannot rely on the scarcity of that knowledge and their is a surfeit of well-educated people.

All is in upheaval, and those who recognize that will not build their houses on sand. But there is nowhere anything but sand…

Sometimes it is nice, because we are sleeping outside in the summer and seeing the stars. But winter is cold, and we have no walls, no roof.

Maybe a model similar to this would allow grad programs to give chances to people from non-elite backgrounds, but also to cut back on the number of people allowed to pursue doctoral degrees. Not exactly the best of both worlds, but maybe a less-bad world than the one we now have?

Silverliningly,

First of all, I think you are also walking towards something that is just less self-involved, not omphaloskeptic enough to have named itself yet.

Secondly, I am sorry to hear this, because that means it’s not going well for you, and transitions are hard and frightening and draining (I can say that, since I’ve been in one or another my entire adult life) and break-ups always hurt. Academia seems a little more vivacious with Tim Carmody in it, and I liked the idea of sending students on to you.

Regarding the topic of the posts: I think Drout has a point with his analysis of the economic dynamics of the system–pinching the pipeline at a different point will only have other, equally bad consequences for the business of creating and disseminating knowledge–but that his conclusion (essentially tarring all would-be reformers as self-involved whiners) misses a key point. I can’t make that point for other fields, but I can make it for the one I am best acquainted with, which is laboratory science: unlike entertainment, sports, & business, laboratory science (and academic knowledge in general) is fundamentally a public good, and one which the public often desperately requires. At some level, if the “gene pool” of people producing new rock styles or better batting averages is thinned out, it’s not a big problem and I don’t actually care; if a narrow “gene pool” of innovators in antiobiotic-resistance research is slowing down research, it’s a big fucking problem for all of us. The public (often directly) pays for the training of these Ph.Ds and if that investment is being wasted, it’s the public’s duty to figure out how and why.

I think his dismissal of dutifulness and the resulting bitterness in this context is equally brusque. Ph.D. students are often exactly those people who could make a lot of money doing something else, but their sense of duty impelled them to try and do something for society. This can be significantly different then the motivations of those pursuing the risks of entertainment & sports. Essentially, they bet on helping society and society gave them the figure. That may be foolish on their part, but merely dismissing them as whiners makes me wonder what’s the point of paying him to be a cultural critic?