Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky. (See my own posts below.)
I especially appreciate how Bady's remarks about how Shirky stacks the rhetorical deck in his own favor, so that anyone inside higher education is incapable of questioning higher education. Oh, but I'm a librarian, so I'm not capable of questioning so famous a writer. I must be part of the problem, and I'm solely hell-bent on self-preservation, apparently.
One might add, by Shirky's logic, that anyone inside capitalism is incapable of questioning capitalism --this is the classic "false consciousness" rhetoric: your consciousness is false, so you are unable to see that your consciousness is false. This is another variety of the rhetorical move made in previous decades by Michel Foucault, for whom power was everything --and if you question Foucault, you obviously do so because you resist Foucault's power with your own. Huh?