Baude and Cohen on Change (Higher Education Edition)

Have a look at Will Baude's very interesting response to Glenn Cohen's post on the sorts of reforms to higher education that seem most and least promising in light of technological and other challenges (or advances). Here's a bit from Will's post:

I'm much more skeptical of a refrain that Glenn employs a couple of times in his post-- the idea that it's helpful for us to imagine that we were "creating the first universities for our day and age," and use those imagined ideal first universities to evaluate whether and how our actual universities ought to change. Maybe it's my inner Hayek, but I'm not sure how good our imaginations really are, and I'm not sure how relevant the product of those imaginations ought to be.

I mean, for starters, once we are in the imagining business, why universities? If we were creating the first system of higher education for our day and age, is there any reason to believe we would do it via university, rather than some much more unbundled combination of written and oral materials? Would we have general rather than specialized certifications? And if we did decide to invent universities, what ought they be like? Despite having thought about this for a while, I honestly have no idea, and I'm skeptical of most of those who do have a confident idea.

I come at this problem quite differently. One of the defining characteristics of American universities is the way that they've become embedded in our society over time, and the set of social norms in and around them. You don't have to be Tyler Cowen to think that two of the main reasons people learn things by going to universities are the effects of socialization and the higher social status obtained by going. We can tell stories about the superiority of interactive class discussion over the internet and the library, but surely those embedded social effects are a huge part of any such superiority. And many of those social norms are bottom-up, not top-down. Imagining new from-scratch universities pushes us to dissociate the university from some of its most important virtues.

Baude and Cohen appear to be discussing the best way to approach the reform of higher education. But I wonder if the fundamental difference between them isn't really so much about higher education specifically, but about the general nature of institutional change. One other quick thought: whether one believes that the university's existing educational virtues are worth preserving may depend at least in part on the extent to which one also believes that those virtues continue to be maximally conducive to the university's educational mission. But I take part of Will's point to be that it is difficult to think well about that sort of issue in vacuo.