ULife asked: “What is a college related issue that needs to be addressed?”

Jazz majors at every college that I’ve ever been to have a common refrain: Jazz is over. It was over before it ever became accepted in college music curricula that until then had focused exclusively on classical music. The institution was so slow picking up the new form that by the time Jazz was taught in school, it was already old news.

The biggest problem with the university system today is how slow it is to assimilate new ideas in a current information world of 24 hour news and fad and fashions that end before they even start.

It used to be that the great works of academia or public thought could bind several generations of education and thought. Plato’s thought was preserved in the writings and teachings of his disciples, most prominently Aristotle, who solidified it into a philosophical school of thought that consistently dominated classrooms almost to the present century. Schools of thought like these and the academic bodies of work that accumulated around them became the foundation of a university system in which knowledge was collected, interpreted, and disseminated among students. A system that put the university in the unique function of selecting which information merited preservation in history and which would disappear with their authors, and it was as such that works of art and ideological systems became universally important.

However, today we inhabit a world in which access to information has been democratized to every person, meaning that ideas that were previously the domain of the ivory tower can now be found on Wikipedia and YouTube. Our generation gets their news from the Daily Show, finds new books through underground blogs, and searches for new music in the nethers of Myspace, and these platforms deliver the newest information at such a high speed that only digital media with user-generated data can keep up. In other words, our ideas expire sooner than ever before, too quickly for universities to include them in the curricula, or hire faculty, or even to acknowledge the idea at all.

What we need is a school system that uses technology and young, energetic faculty to keep up to date with the cutting edge of philosophy, art, culture, science, and every field that it hopes to train young people in. They can only reassert themselves as learning centers when students come out knowing what is current in their field, not the history of thought on the subject.