And once university research funding dries up (no need for professors = no one to do research and write grants), who’s going to do the fundamental R & D that companies have increasingly farmed out to (or stolen from) research institutions over the past few decades?

The only thing that won’t be at a premium are “ideas” like Christensen’s.

my state university forces us to indicate how we will implement Christensen’s creative disruption (mentioned by name and with references) in all our internal funding applications. every time I see it I want to run into the President’s office with the quotations you’ve picked out (and others) and ask him how long he plans for the university to continue to exist, so I can figure out my career plans.

But money isn’t really the point for zealots (and I use the religious term advisedly) like Christensen. They want the publicly-funded enterprise, through which independent, critically-minded researchers in everything from geochemistry to gender studies are enabled to work in many institutions and influence many other fellow citizens, destroyed. It’s a wild-eyed ideological campaign disguised (as is so often the case) as a common-sense pragmatic one.

Arguing the technical dimensions of whether MOOCs could be effective for democratizing certain aspects of knowledge-diffusion (they could be, managed entirely differently than they are at present) misses the point.

Unfortunately, I think many of the MOOC proponents don’t care so much about real learning as they do about money, whether in profits or savings.