We’re Living Much Longer. Maybe We Need College for Elders?

For the past 10 or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic — when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.”

Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley — or anywhere — happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine.

That magazine became Wired — and the company and community we built felt like pursuing an academic education, but with the real world as our campus. It came complete with a deep bench of “tenured professors” — Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, William Gibson — as well as the chance to revise and defend our “thesis project” on a monthly basis, in public and…