The gourmet, bespoke, personalized, and designed just-for-you creation is so appealing on this planet of 7 billion people. You are not just a number. You are special. Even your burger roll is artisan.
“My word is my bond,” business “done with a handshake,” and “honor codes” are not even the rhetoric of the day, much less the reality.
The university may well be antiquated, hypocritical, and in some ways outdated, but at its best it is a bulwark against the pressures, market and otherwise, that celebrity tweeters, #failedintellectuals, and smart writers will certainly face.
Generational snapshots sometimes confound us in the ways actual photographs do.
So rather than rehash tired clichés about the jargony nature of academic writing – itself a form of redundancy! – we might also want to consider one of academic writing’s functions: it is there to innovate, not comfort.
The Urbanization Project recently brought together urban policy scholar Richard Florida, economist Paul Romer, and sociologist Robert Sampson for a panel on "The Challenge of the City" in which they addressed the challenges and potential for cities in the next hundred years.