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http://brooklynrail.org/2006/11/art/tj-clark

Tough subject… You won’t be surprised to hear (remember I began as a university teacher in 1967!) that teaching for me has always seemed a pretty embattled activity, taking place in a culture—university culture very much included—increasingly turned against it. Let’s call it the culture of multiple choice, of lectures as performances, of “methodologies” chosen from the supermarket shelves of “disciplines,” of books as disposable databases on the verge of being superseded by others less quaint and inflexible (less “elitist”). This culture has always been the dominant one in the universities I have worked for. There is almost no difference, ideologically speaking, between the claptrap of Clark Kerr and Harold Wilson (universities “forged in the white heat of the new technological revolution”) and the current utopia of cyberspace and “virtual higher education.”