A Nicholas Thompson post at the New Yorker blog looks at the peculiar state of Stanford University, which has administrators tacitly encouraging students to drop out of school to create riches for themselves and their elders. It’s not so much a sign of the decentralization of modern education as it is a contemporary tale of a gold rush and things that get lost in the haste. The post’s opening:

“Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessy, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.