The future of academia is surrounded by bottomless speculation. The Coronavirus Pandemic has accelerated processes of inevitable change long overdue in the academy. However, any query poised to question future trends in academia cannot be achieved without radical changes supporting traditional perceptions of academia. Are the brick & mortar facades of college campuses becoming increasingly irrelevant? Will class sizes increase or decrease through curriculums designed around enhanced distance learning? Will it be easier or more difficult for undergraduates to engage classroom curriculum when replacing live dialogue with online forums? Is there greater retentional value writing interactive posts when exploring new concepts & subject matters when compared to methods supporting traditional textbook memorization?
How we approach learning shapes the working relationship we develop with education. When both intersect into a “conjunctional event horizon,” learning turns education into knowledge. The unifying couplet of which is had in information best translated as the power of new & innovative ideas. Our traditional expectation of academia is overwhelmingly a utilitarian one, a far cry from its esoteric beginnings long before the arrival of the printing press. It ultimately exists to harvest information into tangible education for pursuits of practical application. For that reason, the professionalization of science has lamented heavily on the legitimization of academia where the unity of science has succumbed to a hegemony of material pragmatism with heavy emphasis on decision making processes dedicated to the regulation of knowledge production in science generally. (Turner Stephen. (2019). In an age of “informational instantaneity,” why have we failed to rethink academia in a reality defined by informational overabundance? Is it not our moral obligation to transform information into knowledge benefiting future generations?
Cooperatives are typical of housing associations, communal farms, & vocational industries. There remains one unresolved curiosity turned question teeming with enthusiasm: why have we failed to introduce the cooperative modality to academia generally & academia specifically? If possible, the next great series of questions on the matter must resolve dynamics of ownership & accreditation. Would an academic cooperative be administered by students or faculty? Perhaps both? Would it be confined to one campus or to multiple campuses online? Would collegiate sports equally compete for resources with traditional scholastics? Is such an institution desirable in the first place considering standards related to administrative transparency? How would an academic cooperative achieve, maintain, & ultimately preserve pedagogical standards? How we define the dissipation of education during a worldwide pandemic demands a reawakening & reshaping of new ideas. It therefore goes without saying that disagreements naturally occurring in academia have proven to be as departmental as they are ideological when competing for high relevance while pursuing academic reform. (Neem, Johann, N. (2019).
We know the world before COVID is forever gone as semblances of normality gradually return post-pandemic. However, the overarching question is this: do we truly want to return to the old ways of academia under a superimposed modality of business-as-usual? The bureaucratization of the academy has attributed to the ongoing ossification of tradition & protocol typical of administrative academic nomenclature. It is abundantly obvious: the academy is based on stiffened institutionalism rooted in medieval customs & Latin phraseologies. Thus, iconoclasms understood are iconoclasms applied. Watershed moments in history are achieved through this collective realization: transcendental succession from the bell curve inspires dissipation of new yet untried ideas. This makes novel breakthroughs feasible.
When tasked with redefining academia, we cannot resist wondering: is it necessary to reinvent the wheel to redefine it simultaneously? An “academic cooperative” implies maximum autonomy in the development, retention, & instruction of knowledge turned education. The fact of the matter is the 21st century remains very much a utilitarian driven reality. This implies that education must first & foremost serve a pragmatic purpose. Hence, student debt remains most burdensome for underemployed & underutilized “garbage degree graduates.” Online degree programs propelled by the information technology revolution did little to reduce costs associated with tuition combined with the socioeconomic solvency of academic degrees post-graduation. The material prestige of the Ivy League university remains & has tenaciously prevailed in cyberspace. It is therefore hardly surprising to be reminded that prestige mirroring exclusivity to the “Ivy League Club” forbids a broader diversification of academic organization as an institutionalizing rule of academia.
The beginning of an academic cooperative can entertain the possibility of a hybrid institution where tuition, private philanthropic endowments, & publicly subsidized grants combine for purposes of lowering tuition by offering the best of both worlds to students & faculty: the traditional academy & online university. An institution free of ideological binding through endowments turned financial entanglements. If universities from the same “Ivy League Club” pledged to support the first “academic cooperative” through official sponsorship & financial backing, greater educational equity could be had in ways where traditional limits to higher education are removed & ideally eliminated.
Imagine! An academic identity defined by accessibility & creativity without traditional overheads such as collegiate sports or overzealous academic administration. It would be an institution based on intellectual autodidacticism. It cannot be stressed enough: the underpaid & overworked academic postdoc caricaturizes a living human tragedy. Why not push postdocs to pursue research beyond tenured tutelage in such an institution where students & academics work collaboratively to push new & unexplored boundaries in human knowledge while eliminating student debt simultaneously by deemphasizing administrative politics?
Can academia supersede careerism & complacency in the ivory tower in the interest of expanding into the unknown as the next great academic frontier? The formation of an academic cooperative can potentially show us how.
References
Neem, Johann, N. (2019). What’s the Seek Purpose Point in an Age of Reform of College. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Turner, Stephen. (2019). The Social Structures of Global Academia. Taylor & Francis Group.