The platform university: the destruction and resurrection of universities in the auto-industrial age

[Extract] Right across the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop­ ment), the prevailing model of the university, the mass post-industrral university, is in deep trouble. It took off in 1970. Today, it is an educational, research, fiscal, and careers-enhancing failure. It is consumed by wasteful bureaucracies, point­ less functions, grossly inflated costs, falling research output, diminishing discovery, chronic dropout rates, and a poor return on student investment. Degrees are of diminishing value; university graduates increasingly end up in low-level service occupations. The post-industrial university has few, if any, means of reversing this. Yet more confronting still than the creeping entropy of these ageing institutions are the epic structural changes that are percolating under the surface of contemporary economies. In the past two centuries, leading societies have moved through agrar­ian, industrial and post-industrial stages. Each stage involved large-scale structural change. Today, post-industrialism is being supplanted by auto-industrialism