Story from Salon by Andrew Leonard. Same guy who did earlier story that online wouldn’t ruin education. More about him below.

But says here that he’s realized now that this revolution is different than music online because politics is involved. Politics is one of the facts of life, and is always involved somehow of course, but I think he means, really involved in the sense of perhaps determining what happens rather than other factors doing so.

Noteworthy to me is that it’s about time for the crisis in Higher Ed to become a huge national conversation, and all of those type conversations inevitably have political “takes” on them…the party lines get put in place, and the lines between liberal and conservative become hard and fast…like iron curtains, if you will.

Thus always to utopian changes, there’s the dreamy blue sky period, followed by the scrambling for the new opportunities, which then devolves into power grabs and alas power politics as well. So we know it’s coming for this part of the communication tools revolution. And with the $$$ now in play, and as Leonard points out the political actors taking the stage…although he kind of glosses over the Teacher’s Unions in his article…perhaps the dreamy blue sky period is waning.

Hate it when that happens, as I’m a blue sky kind of guy. Like to surf the blue sky waves. Las Cruces has a lot of blue skies, and with the particular group of clients in this region, powergrabs may be slower to develop. But I’ve been warned to keep an eye out for some flying in to grab the eggs in the nest. A certain local non profit led by a former City Leadership guy, for example, although any good thing will attract competition. Way it is.

Andrew Leonard tends to get their ahead of the pack on breaking waves:

Andrew Leonard has been working at Salon as a technology reporter, editor, blogger and staff writer for quite a bit longer than he ever anticipated being employed by an online magazine — 15 years.

He’s enjoyed the luck of becoming obsessed with the Internet just before it broke into mainstream consciousness and the housing bust just before it precipitated a global economic collapse. Prior to becoming a Salon lifer he freelanced for a wide variety of publications, from Newsweek to Rolling Stone to Wired, and wrote a book, “Bots: The Origin of New Species”. He lives in Berkeley, Calif., with his two children and he likes to ride his bicycle up hill.