There are huge challenges we face as a society. The growing racial divide. All these are grave dangers. But I would argue that the deepest crisis is that we are in a time of profound technological and social change, and mostly people see these as beyond human control. Higher education is a microcosm of the dangers and the powerlessness, alike.
New technologies are like a genie out of the bottle for higher education.
There is a profound fatalism in Levine, but a sense of powerlessness, I have found, affects faculty. Faculty members, by and large, experience an insidious socialization, especially in graduate school. We learn a stance of ironic detachment, and embody such detachment in a variety of ways. The image of the detached and objective scholar and teacher is woven into the fabric of our work. The ideal of the detached scholar, teacher, and outside expert has roots in the impact of German universities on American scholars in the late nineteenth century.