There’s a real lack of understanding of the social structures of higher education. This is especially true right now where people tend to fall into the trap of adopting Neo-liberal understandings of what higher education is and should be based on market and technology forces. There’s a kind of folk understanding that we are in the business of delivering content efficiently and that the private sector is somehow better at it. Some consider higher education a barely structured anarchy.

But what if you see higher education as what it actually is, which is a means to create new knowledge across various heterogenous fields as well as a means less to transmit known content but instead culture? Then you enter another intellectual understanding altogether.