I really like these ideas, but my concern is (and has been for a while), the 75% of faculty (largely in the humanities) who are off the tenure track. Many are no longer in graduate school, and these kinds of opportunities need to be extended/targeted to them. We help re-train workers who lose their manufacturing jobs, and we completely ignore the very real job relocation problems faced by adjuncts. I fear for a lost generation of academics, with tenured professors sitting pretty and the next generation of PhD students better equipped to meet the challenges. Higher education has completely abdicated their responsibility to the thousands of PhDs and MA students who they "trained" for jobs that don't exist. They have been stitching together their meager existences for a long time. I think it's time for the academy to step in a lend a hand.

I'm @readywriting on Twitter and Lee Skallerup Bessette on FB!