As for professors finding “someone willing to pay them to do research and write articles,” this is actually what we spend an enormous amount of time doing. In fact a common complaint among researchers is that we spend as much or more time writing grant proposals to fund research than actually doing research. If teaching were all done by adjuncts or via MOOCs, it would leave everyone in the position that those of us on “soft money,” already endure, i.e., constant pressure to raise funds with no job security. It is not exactly a situation that encourages careful contemplation or slow, laborious work on unpopular topics, but those are just the sorts of things that often produce unheralded breakthroughs, and anyway expand the boundaries of human knowledge.

As for subsidizing your mechanic’s time working on the hot rod, I am actually OK an indirect form of that called unconditional basic income. But I realize that’s not an incredibly popular position.

Heck, we already knew that. Wikipedia exists because internet users will willingly work very hard for little else than the satisfaction of sharing their knowledge with thousands of other internet users at a time.

“[MOOCs] are likely to play an important role in devaluing and destroying one of the few humane and satisfying forms of employment left: teaching in exchange for time, freedom, and access to resources for scholarly activity as a university professor.”

But why should “time, freedom, and access to resources for scholarly activity” be something that university students subsidize with their tuition? Why do we have to have that fig-leaf of teaching? “Prof’s never in his office and his grad student does all the lectures” is not just a National Lampoon punchline. Maybe if what the professors want is to do research and write articles, they should find someone willing to pay them to do research and write articles. Tuning up a hot rod might be a humane and satisfying form of employment, but if my mechanic quotes nine hours to do a job and then spends eight of them tuning up his hot rod, then I don’t say “I’m happy to pay extra money if it supports his ability to engage in a human and satisfying form of employment”.