The End of Higher Education: A Discussion About Purpose

(Michael Wesch) .... Hey, hello everybody!

Welcome to the first connected course's live session.

I'm here with Randy Bass and Kathy Davidson

and we're going to talk about "The end of higher education",

both in that sort of gloomy sense of what's happening right now

and, you know, are things -- are we really coming to an end,

are we at a turning point?

But also about the "end" of higher education as in the "purpose" of higher education:

what should it be?

And if this is a moment of reinvention

maybe this is a chance to redefine who we are and what we're doing.

So, we have Randy Bass and Kathy Davidson,

two outstanding scholars and great thinkers in this area.

Randy is Vice-provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University.

He was also the founding director of Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship

.... kindles (check 1:00)

really a wonderful organization, and I had the pleasure visiting there once

and had a wonderful time:

this is a great space of innovation in education and pedagogy.

He has written many wonderful things; I'll just point to one that might be relevant to this:

in -- I think it was just maybe a couple of years ago --

"Disrupting ourselves - the problem of learning in higher education."

That's a great article that I think provides some good background

for some of the things we'll be talking about today.

And then also, we have Kathy Davidson here.

Kathy recently moved to the Graduate Center at the CU (check) University of New York.

She is now Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative there,

which is a program designed to train the next generation of College professors

and I saw once how many people you might be affecting.

It's tremendous, and I think we're all excited to have somebody like you in that position,

affecting so many people and possibly,

having a tremendous influence on the future of higher education through that role. (2:06)