“I think the state of reading and writing will be *different* in ten years as a result of the Internet. Languages evolve, and established practices for writing evolve; when books were hand-lettered by scribes, they were written very differently than they are now, but it’s hard to make a case that the practice got “worse.” The Internet and associated publishing tools — blogs, Twitter, and the like — may have an accelerating effect on those changes; the art of reading, writing, and rendering knowledge is likely to evolve more quickly than it has in the past, and there are some who would argue that that is a bad thing. I think it will be different; not better, not worse, but…

Anyone who’s worked in U.S. higher education has heard the mantra: colleges should be run as efficiently as a business. (We’re assuming they don’t mean a business like Lehman Brothers, of course.) Business are flexible and adaptive and they efficiently contain costs. What that actually means in practice, of course, is that the system has become two tiered: on top, a shrinking pool of tenured faculty, beneath them, a growing base of adjunct with little job security.

The recent reports suggesting that the public doesn’t trust colleges (Public Agenda survey finds deep skepticism) are unsurprising and ironic. Unsurprising, becuase this has been their (conservative, administrative) calling card for a few decades, and ironic because the public sees these…