Universities are tremendous users of energy---the computers, the parking lots full of cars, the machines everywhere, the subsidized cafeterias, the travel budgets for attending symposia. I work at one and my feeling lately is "this CAN'T go on!".

It's like when I go to a modern supermarket and compare this experience (the plastic, the processed foods, the parking lot, the heating/cooling system, the use of electricity) VS the tiny one-room shop (the shop owner lived upstairs or behind the shop), it's open to the air and the owner wears a jacket, nothing is wrapped in plastic, the produce or tofu is just sitting there "nakedly", there is no parking lot, no cash register, no lights (just daylight). no refrigeration, nothing except this old guy and a table of carrots, lettuces, cucumbers. etc.. (The older model of shop is still very common in the OLDER sections of cities and towns in Japan and the streets are tiny and walkable because there were no cars when they were built.)

The modern university is as wasteful as the the modern supermarket, with about as much future. People are going to find that for delivering food energy, the older model of shop is unbeatable for efficiency---you have to walk to get there, you don't have to pay for plastic, etc.

For delivering "learning" the system will come up with something else....a kind of reformulated university.....I suppose the system will crash bit by bit first as things shut down due to lack of resources. Nevertheless, pieces will remain open, limping along. I guess these will be much more efficient than they are now. I think a lot of "fat" will be cut. This budget cutting process is already in full swing here in Japan, by the way, as the population of 18 year olds shrinks every year!

Modern universities naturally don't want to think about the hard times ahead for them. Who does? That is not a pleasant thought! Much easier to organize a symposium on something more palatable than SHUTTING DOWN HALF the place down. Layoffs are an awfully unpleasant thought, too.

By the way, it should be noted that some lenders in the USA have stopped making loans to students at 2-year colleges. The colleges will obviously suffer the same fate as many supermarkets will face--cutbacks, trimming, closures, shrinking. It starts with the weakest ones and it moves up the food-chain. Harvard--or, depending on your point of view, Yale-- is last!I am not saying colleges will cease to exosts, but they'll be smaller.

And, if you look to the past for some direction, you will see that higher learning was really for a tiny fraction of the elite, not the huge percentages that attend college today. Also, monasteries or temples were the setting, not necessarily universities.

It should be noted that I love shopping in the older style shops (you have to live in a district where they are available, of course) here in Japan. I might not mind teaching in the more efficient way that evolves. Or maybe I'll be out of a job and into the garden.