GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Should Deans Tell Their Faculty To Get Off Twitter And Get Back To Work?

Plus, the real problem isn’t Twitter, but the lame people in charge of our institutions: “Barro argues also that Twitter and other social media sites, or semi-social media sites like Slack, have encouraged newsroom revolts. … [T]hey don’t care about running a news ‘organization’ qua organization. Their interests are more personal and individual than institutional. … To maintain institutions under those circumstances requires managers who have both a sense of what the institution is there for and a willingness to assert and defend that sense, including against its own members. Although many discussions of these issues focus on the younger rebellious generation and its arguable errors, the primary responsibility and the greater problem is the lack of either will or a clear sense on the part of the older managers. The greatest crisis of our time is institutional, and the crisis lies as much or more with those who are charged with maintaining them as with those who are challenging or simply not interested in them. . . . We could call this a social-media problem, or we could see it as a cultural problem, an institutional crisis more generally in contemporary society, that is amplified and exacerbated by social media.”