Information, journalism, academia, and the market

Today at Inside Higher Ed, our own Professor Jonathan Senchyne writes about his experience at the New York Times shortly after one of that paper's most prominent columnists laments the alleged passing of the "public intellectual" (or civically-engaged academic knowledge worker).  From Senchyne's piece:

In September 2013, I attended The New York Times Schools for Tomorrow Conference (theme: "Virtual U: The Coming Age of Online Education") held at the conference center of the Times’s new building (video archive streaming here).

What I learned there -- besides how weird corporate-sponsored conferences are, right down to commercials they looped on screens between talks -- is that there is a system of content generation that feeds thinkpieces and thinkfluencers with greater speed and sound bite concision than most professors can offer.

It’s important to note that the only professors on stage at this conference on the future of higher education had left teaching and research as faculty for academic upper administration or to launch their own MOOC companies. While Kristof might see this lack of platform as more evidence of academic self-cloistering, I see it for the closed system that it is: “influence” comes mainly from those who might be in the position to take out full-page ads in the Times.

Read the rest of the piece here.  It's worth it.