I've talked on this blog before about why I think there's an opportunity for a really interesting and genuniely consequential restructuring of higher education, driven most fundamentally by basic demographic changes in the history of the species happening now.  

This morning I opened up a weekly newsletter I get, written by Goldie Blumenstyk, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, about changes in the higher ed world.  (You can sign up for free here.)  She's a good reporter, and also much franker with her own opinions in the newsletter than she is in her official articles.  (Once again, as with blogs I think, the informality pays off with more interesting provocations, if articulated a bit less responsibly--at least in my case.)  She writes about returning to a project run at Stanford about reimagining the university, and I found her talking about this:

The one that really stirred my and other folks’ juices was the proposal called Open Loop University. It was a simple notion: Instead of designing institutions for students who would go to college for four years right after high school, Stanford and other universities would be reconfigured so they could offer six years of baccalaureate-level education over students’ lifetimes.

I really like this idea, so I looked over http://www.stanford2025.com/open-loop-university? to see what they came up with.  Mostly what they had was branding, though in a couple instances the branding pointed to some interesting changes.  For me the most interesting was the idea that people would change "from alumni to populi," meaning (I think) that the distinction between student and completely educated person would go away.  

I like that a lot.  In fact, I've recently begun thinking that professors are simply more thoroughly-prepared students, who are trying to introduce students (undergrads and grads in different ways) to a "life of learning."  Even our "research" can be understood as only secondarily Fordist, that is, only secondarily resulting in portable "products" like new drugs or medical techniques or books or critical editions or what-have-you,  and more primarily resulting in a deepening (or at least more potentially finely-grained) collective understanding of the subjects under study.

And, from the "student" side, the idea of fully and self-consciously acknowledging the way that education and formation is a life-long task seems really smart as well.  Certainly the questions I'm asking now, as a middle-aged professional white guy who's a parent, are different than the  ones I was asking when I was a twenty-two year old punk.  But the questions are no less real.  Why not give me a context in which I can ask them, at least some times, in a structured community?

Anyway, I'm just building up a body of links and my own random thoughts so that one day, when the time is ripe, I can inflict all this on some unsuspecting administrators.  Or something like that.  Seriously, though, I really think this stuff could be exciting.