Maybe there's some HN value here - I've been thinking for some time the next great establishment to lose most of its influence due to the Web will be academia.

Maybe there's some HN value here - I've been thinking for some time the next great establishment to lose most of its influence due to the Web will be academia. Universities seem like record companies ca. 1996, or media companies ca 2000 - too confident and self absorbed to realize reality is routing around them right now, making most of them obsolete with a few years.