Mark C. Taylor’s op-ed in the NYTimes is a real challenge to the structure of higher education…

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)……

I especially appreciated one of his suggestions:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

We’ve been imagining something like this in the Library as well. The Library’s role in learning/teaching as well as in the creation of knowledge lies in its ability to create and facilitate communities of scholarly discourse that spans traditional disciplinary boundaries. These communities engage problems as Taylor suggests in the context of the collections that embody scholarly discourse through the centuries…

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