Phi Beta Cons

News from 2029

I’ve gazed 20 years into the future in a posting on the National Association of Scholars website. In “The Shape of (Academic) Things to Come,” the public ultimately comes down in favor of the efficiencies of the online education. The “Great Transition” leaves a remnant of residential colleges, but they become marginal to American society. Science finds a new footing in independent laboratories and think tanks. A new pattern of maturation takes hold for youth who discover the advantages of combining work with part-time online degree programs. College campuses are creatively “re-purposed,” scholarship transitions to an amateur avocation, and the chaff of ideological nonsense just blows away. It is a bittersweet picture. Old AAUP veterans evoke the lost golden age of tenured rage. All gone.   

Peter W. WoodMr. Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars and the author of 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project and Wrath: America Enraged.
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