An End to Maastricht University As We Know It

Quartz

“Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975. They’re about the same size to within a factor of two; they’re about the same number of buildings; they operate on about the same calendar; they have many of the same people or some number of the same people in significant positions.”

Larry Summers, the economist who served for five years as president of Harvard Think of the college library. A musky, magnificent space—rooms topped out by cathedral ceilings, golden light angling in with otherworldly might, illuminating rows of students camping out amongst shelves or hunching over at wooden tables riddled with decades of frustrated pencil marks and the thuds of limb-tearing textbooks. That is what it was. No longer.

Over the last several decades, the university library has become less vital, its books getting dusty with disuse, its edge-worn card system replaced by digital catalogs and powerful scanning machines that could put entire tomes online in minutes. Some schools, like the University of Chicago, moved much of their physical collections underground. Others, like the University of Texas at San Antonio, rethought the idea of a library, opening study spaces without physical books at all.

Instead of going to libraries for resources and information, most students these days congregate there mainly to toss ideas back and forth, write essays together, work on group projects. Shocking as it might seem, there is one catch-all answer that could be the remedy to many of these concerns: Cut the campus loose. Axe the physical constraints. The library? Classrooms? Professors? Take it all away. The future of the university is up in the air. Rapid-fire innovation out of Silicon Valley has allowed students to chat over an array of messaging apps from their dorm-room beds and work at lightning-fast speed across digital platforms.

The same radical disruptions are taking place, simultaneously, in other spaces on campuses: Ancient classrooms and musty hallways are no longer a requirement for university education, as they have been for the last several centuries.

 Texas A&M University is currently debuting a first-of-its-kind online lecture, which will replace a mandatory introductory economics lecture: Students can pass the entire semester (with flying colors, at that) without ever having to see the professors, or one another, in person. At many other universities across the US, textbooks are going the way of Netflix. That means they no longer need to exist in physical form. In some cases, even the teachers are going virtual. Continue reading at Quartz From Part Four of a series.

Part One: The college lecture is dying.
Good riddance Part Two: College textbooks are going the way of Netflix 
Part Three: Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers