What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [113]
But seriously…if one has the luxury of time and resources to explore the world before buckling down to a job and a mortgage, great. That exploration can take the form of backpacking around Asia, hanging out in a dorm, or joining the Peace Corps. Or these days, it may mean starting a company. Our young years may be our most creative and productive. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google boys dropped out of school at various stages to start their corporate giants. Should we be forcing young people to go through 18, 16, or even 12 years of school—trying to get them all to think the same way—before they make things? Instead of the perennial call to subject our youth to mandatory national service—how’s that for a way to squander a precious resource?—shouldn’t we instead be helping them find and feed their muses?
Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization. We may want to create a preserve around youth—as Google does around its inventors—to nurture and challenge the young. What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one course a term or one year in college to create something: a company, a book, a song, a sculpture, an invention? School could act as an incubator, advising, pushing, and nurturing their ideas and effort. What would come of it? Great things and mediocre things. But it would force students to take greater responsibility for what they do and to break out of the straitjacket of uniformity. It would make them ask questions before they are told answers. It could reveal to them their own talents and needs. The skeptic will say that not every student is responsible enough or a self-starter. Perhaps. But how will we know students’ capabilities unless we put them in the position to try? And why structure education for everyone around the lowest denominator of the few?
Another byproduct of a university’s society is its network—its old-boy network, as we sexistly if accurately called it. That club has long held value for getting jobs, hiring, and making connections. But now that we have the greatest connection machine ever made—the internet—do we still need that old mechanism for connections? LinkedIn, Facebook, and other services enable us to create and organize extended networks (any friend of yours…) springing out of not just school but employment, conferences, introductions, even blogs. Members of Skull and Bones at Yale and graduates of Harvard Business School may object, but as an internet populist, I celebrate the idea that old networks could be eclipsed by new meritocracies. Facebook didn’t just bring elegant organization to universities, it could supplant them as a creator of networks.
The next role of the university will be harder to nurture in a distributed architecture. Research, pure and directed, are values of the academe that the marketplace alone may not support. Unless it has a market value and is paid for by a company, research must be subsidized by foundations, endowments, donations, and tax dollars—and often by the generous passion of the researcher. That will still be the case. The question is whether research will be done in schools or in think tanks and whether it will be performed by professors or by paid thinkers. There’s little reason that research must be performed on campuses by academics and little reason why those academics cannot work in wider networks. Research has long been a process more than a product as papers are peer reviewed and research results are replicated. That is even more the case now as research is opened up online in web sites, blogs, and wikis and as their contents are linkable and searchable via Google (which provides a search