Dreaming spires and concrete halls
“Similarly, the modern University is under threat by a changing focus away from a celebration of the Liberal Arts toward a disproportionate emphasis on the hard sciences due to perceptions around return on investment. Across the world we see reductions in budgets for Liberal Arts and an increase in rhetoric that questions what economic value there is in these programs. This is the destruction of The Shire again before us; the development of the individual into a tool for economic production instead of a cultivation of what makes us uniquely human. The digitalization of education has introduced the logic of efficiency into learning itself, where speed and scale threaten the slower virtues of contemplation and care.” Scott Gibson contributes his SFU Graduate Liberal Studies essay Dreaming Spires and Concrete Halls: The Poetics of Place from Oxford to Simon Fraser University