Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan Universities, writes frequently on the fate of higher education, with particular attention to the changes wrought the technological revolution.
From a recent piece in The Atlantic:
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Given the drumbeat of doomsday declarations about higher education in recent years, it might be tempting to dismiss The End of College as part of the pile-on by would-be disrupters. But that would be mistake. While Kevin Carey, a Washington education-policy analyst at the New America Foundation, may have swallowed too much of the disruption Kool-Aid, his call for more accessible student-centered universities is a powerful response to some of the real problems that beset these institutions today.
In 2008, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, along with Michael Horn, published Disrupting Class, an account of how “radical innovation” would change K-12 education systems. In 2011, Christensen and Henry J. Eyring came out with The Innovative University, which explored how higher ed would have to respond to the pressures of technological change—if it were to survive at all. Christensen’s publications have been followed by a wave of books, articles, op-eds, and films pronouncing the imminent demise of higher ed as the country knows it.
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Read more here on such subjects as MOOCS, the transformation of universities into rites of-passage country clubs rather than houses of learning, the value now placed on the "gospel of disruption," the so-called "hybrid university" in which research and teaching are inextricably linked, and whether traditional learning of traditional disciplines is still possible — and on what terms.