Higher Ed is changing, and Lifetime Learning is important enough to warrant Georgia Tech's founding of a seventh college around the concept. I am looking forward to the 2025 symposium, October 5-7, and will be participating with a presentation on:

The Pleasures of Lifetime Learning:

Amateurs, Dilettantes, and the Past and Future of Higher Learning

Abstract: With the development of the modern research university in the second half of the nineteenth century came the 'othering' of all those not involved in formal and degree-granting forms of learning. An entire vocabulary was invented to denounce those who were learning for simple/easy pleasure (dilettantes) and love (amateurs) instead of the sublimated pleasure coming from complex/hard academic work. This binary distinction, while necessary to build institutions of higher learning in the nineteenth-century knowledge economy, has become ossified and prevents innovation in multiple ways:

1. Formal training and curricula and the degrees associated with them serve as gatekeeping devices against encroaching alternative pathways to ‘higher’ learning, including micro-credentials, certificate programs, etc.

2. Academics themselves consider their active learning phase over after completion of the “terminal degree” or attainment of promotion/tenure. They seldom risk “starting over” as amateurs in a new area of interest, thus preventing venturing into interdisciplinary or holistic visions of wicked problems.

3. The temporality of learning is relegated to school and university education (primary, secondary, and tertiary) and spurious professional development instead of an ongoing lifetime process.

This paper proposes a reevaluation of the binary practices and limiting vocabulary in traditional higher learning, a perspective that would offer a more porous connectivity among and between disciplines and departments. Lifetime learning for me is a pathway for the 21st-century to bring back the joyous natality (in Hannah Arendt’s sense) of beginning something unprecedented which characterized the risk-taking and continually curious scholarship of those who founded modern university education.

See the full program and info on registration HERE.