Michael Gurstein posted David Nobel's latest "alarum":
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> DIGITAL DIPLOMA MILLS, PART II
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> The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction
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When a child gets chicken pox, by the time the pox appears on the skin
the child not only has been infected for a long time, but has been
spreading the contagion. This is not to say that the eruptions on the
skin do not hasten this spread. But the damage has been done.
Bill Readings has written a seminal work, The University In Ruins. That
volume and its references clearly and cogently point out the serious
afflcition which has been inhabiting the Academy of Kant and Humboldt,
for perhaps 50->100 years, certainly since WWII, globally. The current
ululations over the appearance of the equivalence of a pox such as
electronic delivery, virtual private distance institutions, joint
vnetures and the host of other pustulations appearing in the Academy are
mearly the symptoms.
The Academy has lost ists hegemony for a variety of reasons, many of
which are the results of the intellectual arrogance of the high priests.
The Academy is changed, is changing and we can not go back to a past
that never was in a coming future that never will be.
Before one plays reactionary to the current happenings, one needs a
vision of what the Academy should or could be, in the future. The pact
of the Academy with the Nation-State has been broken and, in a global
economy where the Transnationals often have greater fiscal clout than
the countries of the the world, the Nation-State has its own problems.
No longer is the Wisdom locked in the Academy where the Academy can
demand that it be fed the finest of the Nation's youth for
indoctrination. The Nation and the Academy are essentially rudderless,
hoisted by the Academy's deferrence to global universality, a market
well understood by the corporate world.
Untill the Academy figures out what it will be in this brave new world,
fighting about copywrites and electronic collaboration is like putting
a lotion on the pox. it will stop the itching but do nothing for the
underlying "corruption".
cheers
tom abeles
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
