NYT points the finger at 'dragon killing schools'

I've heard it before, in Brazil (from Rubem Alves, but I can't quite recollect), as the story of dragon killers who decide, upon the extinction of dragons, to open a dragon killing school and carry on with it, no matter what. See what says Mark C. Taylor from Columbia University in "End the University as We Know It":

"The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors."

He compares the current graduate education system to Detroit (i.e. the obsolete auto industry that had to be changed). He also defends that "responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural" while pointing scandalous misses and oversights of disciplinarity (the skewed, biased specialization).

Abolish departments, increase collaboration, restructure the curriculum, he says. But then what would dragon killing instructors do? (But, hey, this is the United States. Brazilian dragon killing schools are doing just fine, although some impertinent folks like ourselves at the Graduate Program in Knowledge Engineering and Management insist on interdisciplinarity and interaction with industry.)