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By Root 450 0

while at the same time providing high-quality teaching to a new and quite different student population. Parents, desperate to ensure their kids’ futures, remortgage their houses to pay for college, only to have their young graduates return home and begin their working lives in run-of-the-mill service jobs. At the graduate level, universities are producing a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and developing skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues). Many of our best and brightest spend eight to ten years chasing unfulfillable dreams. Graduate students who finally admit they have no future in higher education are often in their thirties, deeply in debt, and face a difficult challenge to reinvent themselves.

It is not only parents and students who are facing the prospect of financial crisis: the education bubble is about to burst. There are disturbing similarities between the dilemma colleges and universities have created for themselves and the conditions that led to the collapse of major financial institutions supposedly too secure to fail. The value of college and university assets (i.e., endowments) has plummeted. The schools are overleveraged, liabilities (debts) are increasing, liquidity is drying up, costs continue to climb, their product is increasingly unaffordable and of questionable value in the marketplace, and income is declining. This situation is not only unsustainable, but at the crisis point.

A vibrant educational system is essential for democracy to thrive and individuals to prosper in our globalized world. When information is the currency of the realm, education is more valuable than ever. The accumulation and transmission of information are necessary but not sufficient for the viability of higher education. Higher education, in my view, has a responsibility to serve the greater social good, and in today’s world this can be accomplished most effectively by cultivating informed citizens who are aware of and open to different cultural perspectives and are willing to engage in reasonable debate about critical issues. In an age of vitriolic bloggers and contentious cable news shows, when even the pretense of objective journalism is thought unnecessary by many, colleges and universities have an obligation to provide an education that will broaden students’ horizons, helping them to resist the temptation of oversimplification and bias and to sift through misinformation in a world that is ever more complex.

Having taught for many years at a distinguished liberal arts college (Williams) and more recently at a leading research university (Columbia), I have been worrying about the growing vulnerability of higher education for more than two decades. As financial markets spun out of control in late 2008 and early 2009 and most of the people who run higher education continued to be oblivious to the turmoil swirling around them, I published an op-ed essay in The New York Times entitled “End the University as We Know It.” No article I have written provoked anything like the response to this piece. My analysis of the current state of higher education and proposals for change set off a firestorm of discussion and controversy. Within hours the essay was everywhere on the Internet—people were posting it on Facebook, and students reported to me that it was all over the popular blog Gawker. It was the most e-mailed article in the Times for four days and was on their top-ten list for a week. Bloggers were also quick to respond; indeed, the Times had to shut its blog when more than five hundred responses were posted on the first day. There were also responses in major blogs, including those sponsored by The Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic and Harper’s. I received hundreds of personal e-mails, and the op-ed was even translated and published abroad.

What struck me about the response was not only how overwhelming it