"The one thing we don’t get any more from people perched on the high ground of the global economy is the 'creative' part of creative destruction. It’s just carrion eaters all the way down now. " ---Tim, I feel a gut-twitch recognition when you suggest that the tech-'Genii' ('sorta in the pop-trope of I Dream of . . .) can't really do the imagined "creative destruction" that might fruitfully upend some fundamental educational systems. All the "carrion eaters" do and can do with confidence is plug an academic program into one of their capital-harvesting models of increased efficiency propelled by some recognized ('evidence-based or historically-proven) system for simplifying what's complicated about the real knowledge professed by 'professors' to the point that poorly trained but eager consultants can offer standardized, generally understandable, and commercially/legally compliant substitutes for what the old university disciplines argued practitioners had to learn with long, cumbersome study.
You're an experienced academic. I'm sure there are areas of history pedagogy where efficiencies could be contrived (by very experienced historians) that wouldn't undermine the complexities and difficulties required to master the subject. But the "carrion eaters" you speak of only seem to be 'creative' in their fantasied or simply iterative efforts to make an institutionally recognized area of pertinent 'bankable' knowledge easier to transmit as information, easier for students to retain, and likely to make successive graduate classes who are baffled by other ways of engaging with thier knowledge skill set and are, as a result, satisfactorily 'compliant' to the industry that invested in their education.
The financiers bankrupt their capital acquisitions with debt, zero-ing out the value of the 'business' they've purchased with the conviction that (A) if the subject matter is genuinely valuable, a new business will rise to teach it 'betterly' and (B) that they are responsible for extracting the value from old capital for the benefit of shareholders but aren't responsible for real learning or the advancement of knowledge as an end in itself. Whatever-the-hell those ivory-tower aspirations are supposed to mean, understanding them isn't important for financial speculation.
You can see how Elon Musk itches to make the space exploration industry a no-bullshit, results-driven, cut-rate market disruptor (that's hugely supported by government funding). If Musk or his intellectual progeny were moved to take historical studies "to the moon" or "to Mars," you can anticipate what corners they'd cut. You know what kinds of prejudices would be endemic to their revised programs. An experienced professor sees some arguably innovative efficiencies and new ways of relating cogent historical studies to other fields of knowledge. What if the 'old-school' university traditions weren't preferable to education driven by financiers' expectations of how much debt the old diploma mills can burdened with because they were "the devil you knew" but because, for all their weaknesses, they did change over decades and did struggle to enlarge and refine the long-term scope of scholarship?
"The one thing we don’t get any more from people perched on the high ground of the global economy is the 'creative' part of creative destruction. It’s just carrion eaters all the way down now. " ---Tim, I feel a gut-twitch recognition when you suggest that the tech-'Genii' ('sorta in the pop-trope of I Dream of . . .) can't really do the imagined "creative destruction" that might fruitfully upend some fundamental educational systems. All the "carrion eaters" do and can do with confidence is plug an academic program into one of their capital-harvesting models of increased efficiency propelled by some recognized ('evidence-based or historically-proven) system for simplifying what's complicated about the real knowledge professed by 'professors' to the point that poorly trained but eager consultants can offer standardized, generally understandable, and commercially/legally compliant substitutes for what the old university disciplines argued practitioners had to learn with long, cumbersome study.
You're an experienced academic. I'm sure there are areas of history pedagogy where efficiencies could be contrived (by very experienced historians) that wouldn't undermine the complexities and difficulties required to master the subject. But the "carrion eaters" you speak of only seem to be 'creative' in their fantasied or simply iterative efforts to make an institutionally recognized area of pertinent 'bankable' knowledge easier to transmit as information, easier for students to retain, and likely to make successive graduate classes who are baffled by other ways of engaging with thier knowledge skill set and are, as a result, satisfactorily 'compliant' to the industry that invested in their education.
The financiers bankrupt their capital acquisitions with debt, zero-ing out the value of the 'business' they've purchased with the conviction that (A) if the subject matter is genuinely valuable, a new business will rise to teach it 'betterly' and (B) that they are responsible for extracting the value from old capital for the benefit of shareholders but aren't responsible for real learning or the advancement of knowledge as an end in itself. Whatever-the-hell those ivory-tower aspirations are supposed to mean, understanding them isn't important for financial speculation.
You can see how Elon Musk itches to make the space exploration industry a no-bullshit, results-driven, cut-rate market disruptor (that's hugely supported by government funding). If Musk or his intellectual progeny were moved to take historical studies "to the moon" or "to Mars," you can anticipate what corners they'd cut. You know what kinds of prejudices would be endemic to their revised programs. An experienced professor sees some arguably innovative efficiencies and new ways of relating cogent historical studies to other fields of knowledge. What if the 'old-school' university traditions weren't preferable to education driven by financiers' expectations of how much debt the old diploma mills can burdened with because they were "the devil you knew" but because, for all their weaknesses, they did change over decades and did struggle to enlarge and refine the long-term scope of scholarship?