Keeping up with The Times

Just interrupting my stream of thought on horses to wonder whether or not Mark C Taylor is a tenured tool of corporate academia / higher ed?

Here is his August 14 op / ed piece proposing that universities and colleges ought to look at their bottom lines and act toward economic sustainability - through such measures as merging departments of philosophy at institutions like Columbia and NYU. I take it that the point here is largely rhetorical, as Taylor, a professor of religion, uses his own current affiliation (at Columbia) as an example.

In today's Room for Debate blog, Taylor, who is currently professor at Columbia and a professor emeritus at Williams College, calls for mandatory retirement of faculty.

Not that I do not see informed debate as vital - and the rethinking of academia / higher education as critical - but I do not see what Taylor says as especially imaginative. Yet because his is Mark C Taylor, his ideas find a forum in The New York Times and become part of the discourse.