The Sky IS Falling, Dammit!

Ok, maybe that title was just to get your attention. 

The sky is not falling, but there are ugly signs of a of a huge storm building off higher education's coast. Some of my colleagues at the University of Washington Tacoma don't see it, laugh and suggest I'm Chicken Little. But John Hennessey, president of a cute little place called Stanford, agrees with me and recently said "There's a tsunami coming," regarding the change that will be forced upon higher education in the digital age. 

MOODY'S just entered the conversation by downgrading higher education to a negative rating. How can society make it any clearer to us that, like any living organism, we have to adapt and grow and change to survive in the new age in which we find ourselves? 

Young people, unmoved by our love of tradition and ritual, are weighing in with an incredibly dark sense of disappointment. They too offer predictions of failure regarding our ability to see ourselves through this coming storm. Nathan Harden's recent essay, The End of University as We Know It, was so depressing I had to read it in parts. 

The thing that is most disheartening is that these entities outside higher education have taken over the conversation and now may certainly shape the outcome. Because of our silence, our stuck-ness, and our unwillingness to change, society is changing its ideas about us. We squandered centuries of goodwill and wonder why we're feeling besieged.

Sadly, this is happening not from inability to innovate, but from simple hubris. As the world changes, HE proudly refuses to talk about what we must do to prepare ourselves and our students. We're happy as we are; teaching as we always have; researching as we please. We've got it handled!  

Except for the world beating at the gate suggesting...we don't. The cost, relevancy, value, and meaning of an education today are being questioned. Higher education must respond. We must talk about transformation from the inside to meet the challenge of educating "as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible," as Harden says. If we don't change, we will BE changed.

WE have to make a case for what is worth preserving and also acknowledge what we are clinging to simply because we hate change. There are so many insulting rules and regulations against new practice, lowering cost, or increasing engagement at my university, my head spins. Tradition is protected and change is fought and innovators questioned every step of the way.  

We have a problem, reflected in the Moody's rating and the noise growing outside our gates. We know that. The cost of an education is too high and too many students are going into debt that they may never pull themselves out of in getting their degree. Too many students are not completing, disappointed and in debt. We have to be sympathetic to this problem, we have to be creative in helping them achieve more affordable and meaningful education, and we have to do it while preserving what we hold dear and valuable. 

WE have to fight for equal access to education as it becomes once again more the right of the elite and a struggle for the less advantaged. And it seems we have to do it while frightened, stressed and stretched to our limits.

Batten down the hatches; we can do this!

Never Can Say Goodbye

I keep thinkin that our problems
Soon are all gonna work out
But there's that same unhappy feeling and 
there's that anguish, there's that doubt

The Jackson 5 song keeps playing in my head as the world says goodbye to Aaron Swartz this week. He was 26 and he did more for an open internet, for freedom of information, for access, for digital rights - for everything I believe in and hold dear - than peers three times his age. 

He was a co-author of RSS. He was the founder of Demand Progress, and one of the most ardent and effective voices against SOPA/PIPA. He created Reddit. He wrote code that tapped into academic library resources - opening them up to those not privileged to the secret society of the Academy, and he made government documents available to people not as smart as Aaron. He believed publications on academic research, paid for by citizens, should be available to all citizens and he used his coding talents to make that belief a reality. 

And for that, for access to academic research for all, for access to government documents that we still pay 9 cents a page for citizen-owned information, Aaron willingly took heat for his actions, for his beliefs, for social justice and information free and unfettered. 

He was braver and smarter than any of us, but not smart enough to know the cost he would pay for prosecutorial over-reach and how the powers-that-be like to make examples of our best and brightest. Aaron, who had no interest in making money from his brilliance, faced insurmountable legal costs and tens of years in prison for his belief in freedom of information.

To lose a talent like Aaron - skills of code, of kindness, of creativity, of dedication to social justice - because the U.S. Justice Department and MIT knew choosing him as their scapegoat would stop other digital freedom fighters? It's heart-breaking and the consequences are provoking sadness, rage, and revenge across the land. 

Some are working inside the legal system and some, well, not so much. Here's to the beginning of push back - too little, too late, but a tribute nonetheless.

• Working to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
• Working to rein in and hold over-zealous prosecutors accountable
• Anonymous and their multiple front hacktivist plans

Aaron was our hero. And he's gone. And a collective response is just beginning.