Psychology Today | 08.02.2026 23:35
When I read Hollis Robbins' sharp essay this week, "The Rumsfeld Matrix," applying Donald Rumsfeld's famous taxonomy of knowns and unknowns to the crisis in higher education, it caught my attention. Her argument: Universities are over-invested in the "known-knowns" quadrant, spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year transferring settled knowledge into students' heads, while neglecting the quadrants where knowledge actually gets produced. With AI now capable of delivering known-known content cheaply, the case for restructuring is urgent.
