Blind spots in academia are never loud. They don’t show up in meetings, they don’t jump out of research papers, and they definitely don’t appear in accreditation reports. They reveal themselves in the small, private pauses — when academics speak softly, without the need to defend their institution, their discipline, or themselves.

Scene 1: Late Evening, Cambridge Faculty Club

A Nobel nominee in mathematics stares at the fireplace and tells his former student (now a data science CEO), “We train students to solve proofs. Industry wants them to solve problems. We never noticed when the two diverged.”

The CEO smiles kindly — not disrespectfully — and says, “You gave us thinking… we figured out the doing.” A tiny truth. A tiny wound. A tiny smile.

Scene 2: Bengaluru Café — Startup Founder & Her Old Professor

A young founder, fresh from a funding round, meets her beloved computer science teacher.

“You taught me recursion and binary trees,” she says. “But the real world wanted communication, clarity, collaboration… and we never learned those.”

The professor stirs his coffee slowly. “I was so focused on content… I forgot the container.”

Both laugh, because now they know: A brilliant algorithm is useless if the team can’t talk to each other.

Scene 3: Staff Room, Mid-tier Indian College

Three lecturers sit around a steel kettle. One says, “We keep assuming students learn like we learned.” Another adds, “But today’s students are growing in a world where attention lasts eight seconds.” The third quietly whispers, “And we still design 60-minute lectures.”

Silence. Then chuckles at the absurdity — not self-loathing, just honest realisation.

Scene 4: Tokyo University Research Library

A robotics professor complains, “We move slower than hardware cycles. My PhD student’s paper got accepted… after the technology became obsolete.” His colleague replies,

“Our systems were designed for a world where knowledge grew in decades, not quarters.”

They both sigh — frustrated but also weirdly proud of their slowness. Academia moves slow by design. But the world stopped waiting.

Scene 5: WhatsApp Group — International Deans after a two day retreat in Singapore;

The Oxford dean types:

“We prepared students for stable careers.”

The MIT dean responds:

“Careers no longer stable.”

The IIM dean says:

“We taught them frameworks.”

The Berkeley dean adds:

“They need adaptability.”

The IIT dean finally writes:

“And we still think placements = success.”

Five blue ticks.

Five sighs.

Five private awakenings.

________________________________________

**The Blind Spots are not failures.

They are oversights born out of love for old methods — methods that once worked beautifully.**

Academics are not blind because they refuse to see. They are blind because they are looking in the wrong direction — backwards, toward the legacy of perfect learning; sideways, at research metrics and rankings; and upwards, at bureaucracy and compliance.

Meanwhile, students are looking forward. Employers are looking outward. And society is looking everywhere.

________________________________________

The Three Deep Blind Spots (spoken softly):

1. “We overestimate content and underestimate context.”

Decades ago, knowing things was enough. Today, connecting things is everything.

2. “We confuse academic excellence with life readiness.”

A gold medalist may freeze in the first job interview. A mediocre student may build a unicorn.

3. “We believe the system will eventually adapt.”

But adaptation now happens outside the system — in startups, online courses, industry bootcamps, coaching centres, and AI tools that change every month.

________________________________________

But here’s the hopeful twist:

Blind spots don’t make academics weak. They make them human. And humans can evolve.

A professor in Barcelona once told her colleague from UCLA: “We missed a few exits.

But the road ahead is still long. We can catch up if we learn faster than we teach.”

This is the essence of The Blind Spots: A tender, almost affectionate admission that academia — for all its brilliance — sometimes sees everything except the world changing right in front of it.

They are not reluctant to learn. They are just late to notice. And the moment they do… the system begins to transform.