[p2p-research] Universities Irrelevant by 2020?

Mon Apr 27 04:44:52 CEST 2009

excellent insights Sam, do you have a source for that footnote on commons
inspired uni's?

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are Universities that are turning to commons-based methods of
> governance and problem solving [1]. These are the Universities that are
> positioning themselves for the series of changes that are likely to come.
> While many of them are approaching this change in a rather ham-fisted way,
> some are also learning. Those that are learning how to apply commons-based
> governance/problem solving practices are positioning themselves both for
> survival, and for the type of change that they see their students being
> ready for.
>
> (Michel makes a great point that in the east, in Asia, that many
> Universities are possibly in a different track, fulfilling a different set
> of needs. As we know, in the US, Universities are modeled after
> corporations, often with a primary focus on procuring and securing money
> from practically any source available. This is the type of arrangement that
> cannot be sustained. ).
>
> The nature of the change that will like happen in the case of Universities
> will not be collapse, but rather dynamic transformation, which includes
> collapse or die off of some parts of the system, and change in others.
>
> When we talk about "collapse", we are not actually talking about the
> complete eradication/extinction of an ecosystem.
>
> For instance, we can say that the Roman Empire collapsed at around 500AD,
> and yet one could argue that successive empires in Europe carried forward
> many of the patterns of Rome, all the way to this day in the Republic of the
> United States of America, where we still convene a Senate, still arrange
> military and state power structures in ways that are remarkably similar in
> more than a few ways to Roman systems, etc Parts of the institutions of the
> Roman Empire remain with us today. They are cultural inheritances that were
> carried forward even though Rome itself ceased to exist.
>
> Another example is inside of your own body, which carries structures,
> systems, symbiotic relationships, and adaptations that emerged long before
> humans ever existed. Some of them go all the way back to the first organisms
> that we know of.
>
>
> On planet Earth, systems rarely completely collapse and disappear. Instead
> that usually change, evolve, adapt, and pass forward those parts that are
> still usable.
>
> We are in the early stages of seeing some of the Universities change and
> adapt. I think that Ryan can intuit that this change seems very likely to be
> coming. But, if I were to describe what I think is going to happen, I would
> not say that Universities are going to just be obsoleted into collapse and
> non existence. I'd suggest that the *current landscape and configuration of
> Universities is what is going collapse and become obsolete*, in those areas
> where it cannot be sustained. There are people on the edges of Universities
> that are already in the process of changing them, making them more
> networked, more commons-based in wealth creation and curating. Consider
> these people to be the evolutionary agents in the system (mostly at it's
> edges). They are doing it not because they have some kind of fondness or
> nostalgia for Universities and want to nurse them along, but because of the
> conditions of their existence. They are heavily invested in those
> institutions, and yet can see that Universities (especially here in the US)
> cannot sustain centering all activity around securing money.
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 3:32 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> undoubtedly the present system will be under great strain,
>>
>> but I wouldn't discount the power of social demand, higher education is at
>> the heart of the social contract, and the allegiance of the whole middle
>> class depends on it,
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>
>> On 4/25/09, Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 4/22/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> If you had asked me in 1990 whether GM could be on the verge of
>>> > bankruptcy and irrelevance, I'd have said you were delusional.  I'm
>>> sure the
>>> > horse shoe-ers on Main St. in Palo Alto in 1905 thought they had work
>>> for
>>> > life.
>>>
>>> A lot of it depends not so much on the trends in conventional
>>> education and in technical alternatives for networked education, taken
>>> in isolation, but in the larger economic environment.
>>>
>>> I'm thinking of a series of cascading crises in which gasoline in the
>>> U.S. goes over $12/gal., the supply chains of large corporate
>>> manufacturers either collapse or start frantically shortening and
>>> relocalizing, the large hierarchical institutions that provided the
>>> main market for university grads dry up, hollowed-out states lack the
>>> fiscal resources to fund universities at anywhere near the present
>>> level and the securities in private college endowments become
>>> worthless.  And given the current economic environment and Peak Oil
>>> waiting in the wings to return, this is all quite plausible.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Kevin Carson
>>> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
>>> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
>>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
>>> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
>>> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
>>> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
>>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> p2presearch mailing list
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
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>
>
> --
> Sam Rose
> Social Synergy
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>
>
>
> "Long ago, we brought you all this fire.
> Do not imagine we are still chained to that rock...."
>
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>

-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
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