A friend just posted a message to me on Facebook: “How is it going with your new position? BTW, when I read this article, I thought of you.”
The “this article” is in The Nation magazine, and is titled “The Crisis in Higher Education.”
Yes, it’s bad out there in many ways, and not getting better.
But….
I like to take the optimistic view of things. Challenges and problems are there to help us learn lessons. This “crisis in higher ed” is a major challenge. But the system was broken, and needs fixing, and without a “crisis,” change would never happen.
Life’s status quo is too powerful a force to be torn down by anything but crisis.
This crisis presents an opportunity that wasn’t there before: to actually change the system for the better.
On the downside, I expect that this crisis will get worse before university administrators really wake up to what’s going on.
On the upside, when it happens, I expect there will be a significant phase change back towards some semblance of sanity in the system (or, maybe not… in which case, academia will collapse and something better will take its place, like internet-based universities and crowd sourced science).
In the meantime, if you’re already in academe and seeking to improve your odds, you can grab my “ 8 concepts of grant writing success” report for free. It’s my way of saying “thank you for reading.”
