"Questioning the Status Quo"

"The demand for innovation in higher education is widespread and has generated a plethora of books and papers. But too often this discussion ignores the more fundamental question of whether our models for higher education are flawed or at best insufficiently responsive to student needs and societal circumstances. 

Implicit in much of this discussion is the view that undergraduate education, and particularly North American undergraduate education, is in crisis and that the modern university is failing in one of its most important responsibilities.

Thirty years ago, Alan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind(1987), gloomily wrote that the modern university possesses “no vision … of what an educated human being is”. This was followed some years later by Bill Readings’ aptly titled book, The University in Ruins (1996), in which he talks of the “twilight of the university’s critical and social function”. Finding fault with universities has been with us a long time. 

Today, however, there is a new shrillness about this criticism as if we have reached some sort of tipping point around universities as we know them."

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20170627121359534