In an opinion piece, New York Times editor Bill Keller worries about what UD calls Click-Thru U. He cites a distance-friendly but cautious Stanford professor:

… [Sebastian] Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling…?

UD has noted the personal identity/cheating problem mucho times on this blog. She would add to Thrun’s comment a related problem: How do you keep an invisible professor from cheating? The same business of handing the course over to someone else pertains for the instructor. Who is actually running discussions, grading assignments, presenting material?

If the course is merely the professor being filmed teaching, with all interactivity handed to teaching assistants, why shouldn’t the professor merely re-run her performance, with occasional updates and tweaks?

Stanford’s president also has some questions.

… [John] Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he says. And it’s not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning.

Right. Click-Thru U. presents one private, discrete, online experience after another. You learn these skills (how to speak Italian, say) with this software; you learn those skills with that. Or you sit silent and alone in a room and watch some dude talk about the Civil War. You get absolutely no sense of the coherence, ongoing contentiousness, and value of a liberal arts education. Because you’ve perceived no model for higher education, no comprehensive structure for the disciplined inquiring life, you don’t learn why or how to keep learning.

In fact that abstraction – liberal arts education – means absolutely nothing to you. This is what Hennessey’s getting at with his how to keep learning worry. You haven’t claimed your education, as it were; you haven’t been able to grow the acquisition of this or that particular skill into a larger narrative – a narrative shared in real time with others on a real campus – having to do with the life-changing business of gradually coming to know what truly educated people know. What they sound like. What sorts of people they are. How they argue. Why they argue. How serious knowledge shapes personality, morality, politics. Why certain people passionately value intense thought about important things. All you miss with online eduction is the entire deep structure, the entire drama, of culture as it’s carried, struggled with, and articulated, by compelling embodiments of it at universities.

Keller concludes:

Who could be against an experiment that promises the treasure of education to a vast, underserved world? But we should be careful, in our idealism, not to diminish something that is already a wonder of the world.

An eighteen-year-old freshman at Norwich University died at the scene of an after-party crash in Vermont. Eight students were crammed in the car; the driver was drunk.

… in which UD has played a small part, here’s Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, on recent events:

I know many folks get a thrill from watching Righthaven implode, but I must confess that I feel no schadenfreude. Yes, it’s fun (in a bloodsport way) to watch judicial benchslaps. Yes, of course, Righthaven has been a plague on our community, so having them driven out would be welcome relief. Yes, they have contributed to a nice body of defense-favorable precedent. Yet, using the powerful tools of our judicial system, Righthaven has imposed significant financial and emotional costs on hundreds of victims. I feel sad for the victims who have had to fight back for their rights at the peril of losing their homes, and I feel sad that we as a society have accepted a litigation system that allows a scheme like Righthaven to harm for ordinary well-meaning citizens trying to do the right thing. A judicial crushing of Righthaven is inadequate restitution for these victims, so I remain sad about the overall situation.

… David Kosofsky — she’s writing a eulogy for him, and wants to quote some things – UD discovers a poem she forgot she wrote.

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SONATA FOR UNPLAYED PIANOS

That put even the spinnets to sleep,
Those thin inoffensive standup numbers,
Happy to do vaudeville or other light patter –
Anything to keep
From tonal slumber.
Chopsticks, for that matter.

… It’s always a beautiful day in the neighborhood for the Bowl Championship Series. Especially when you throw in tens of millions in profit, immense executive salaries, and barely detectable charitable giving.

During one of the first staff-training days, the district superintendent tells us that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, the implication being how close to obsolescence our methods and we ourselves have become. No one ventures to ask what would seem to be the obvious question, which is what sort of high school education Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had and what they might have failed to accomplish without it.

One reason [Colorado State University] pushed so hard to play an annual game against [the University of Colorado] in Denver was the potential ticket revenue. Sports Authority Field at Mile High, where the Denver Broncos play their home games, holds more than double the 32,500-seat capacity of CSU’s Hughes Stadium.

CSU could bring in more than $1 million in revenue, Kowalczyk said, even after game expenses are deducted, if it were to sell its full allotment of tickets. Instead, the school won’t come close to its budgeted goal of $800,000 in ticket revenue from this game.

But… we could have brought in more than a million… if we’d sold the tickets…!

UD had to look at excellerate for awhile… Think about it…

Since it isn’t a word, she found no definition for it. The inventive Urban Dictionary has a definition for excelerate –

To succeed at something so quickly you excelerate.

– which gets at the brilliance of the mistake. It’s actually a portmanteau – “a blend of two … words or morphemes into one new word.” To excel; and to accelerate.

Anyway, it’s a word a commenter uses after a Wall Street Journal article updates us on the wretched thing that is law school now. Very few jobs. Applications way down.

Makes UC Irvine and – even more – U Mass look terribly clever. Taxpayers in these states get to subsidize these bright new law schools.

The first sentence of this University of Idaho student’s evisceration of the classroom laptop says it all. Technology has defeated the classroom. Online is the wave of the future; and the only question is what universities are going to do with those howling spaces all over campus.

… into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in Beauty and Being Just.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, keeps doing that – spinning off songs and films inspired by it, more than a century after it was written.

Not copies. Scarry didn’t mean exact copies. Aesthetic ripples, echoes.

As in the just-released film, Margaret, which features “an English class recitation of [this] stirring and enigmatic Victorian poem addressed to a young girl of that name.” Spring and Fall is a very morbid poem, and the film has a morbid theme — a kind of coming of age via coming to grips with death theme — that fits the Hopkins poem nicely. When you’re young, you cry over dead things in a babyish visceral way, but you don’t really understand death yet. You’re a kind of mindless sentimentalist, a kitsch-meister. When you’re older, you get it – you understand precisely what death is, and why you’re crying over it. It’s the same fact of death generating the same grief when you’re eight and when you’re eighty, but you have to get significantly past eight to realize this, to feel the reality of death. Apparently the film Margaret is all about the main character’s passage from innocence to experience in this regard.

Hopkins takes this process of death-realization one step further at the very end of the poem:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Our profoundest death-haunting is of course our intimation of our own mortality, so a third phase in this eerie maturation involves a movement somewhat away from despair over other people’s annihilation and toward anticipatory pity for ourselves — toward a sense of our own fragility, our implication in the common fate. The slightly wobbly, slow, vulnerable, meditative, confiding, whispery setting of the Hopkins lines that Natalie Merchant wrote and performed – with a simple melancholy guitar along for the ride – seems to UD quite a good capture of the poem. Here’s the poem.

Spring and Fall

So, you’re crying because the leaves are falling, and all the golden colors are vanishing. Fine. Cry. Your pure emotions make you feel for everything. You feel as much for one dead leaf as you do for human beings, which is pretty strange, but goes to your indiscriminate, innocent, open, heart, unacquainted with the night.

Once you’ve gotten your share of human suffering and death, massive piles of leaves will leave you unmoved. Maturation means losing cosmic, undifferentiated feeling, and directing things like grief where they belong: toward the people you love and lose. Weeping isn’t just acting out now, a visceral reaction to random loss-tableaux; now you will weep and know why.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t yet realize your grief, that you think of your tears as exclusively about the leaves. You’re young. Enjoy it while you can. But even though you can’t articulate the truer, later grief, you probably, even now, intuit it. Probably even now some ghostly soulful understanding in you guesses what underlies childish tears: Grief for all of blighted humankind.

And even more deeply underlying: Grief for your own blightedness.

A 2010 report showed more than $800 million in student fees were used to subsidize athletic programs annually, he said. Vanderbilt spends $10 million-$15 million a year to support its athletics program — at a cost of $2,000-$3,000 per student each year, [Vanderbilt economics professor John] Siegfried said.

That may explain why schools with Division I teams tend to charge higher tuition than those without such teams, he said.

Studies also have shown schools with Division I teams don’t receive significantly more student applications than those that don’t have such teams, he said.

So why did 109 universities upgrade their sports programs to higher divisions in the 1990s?

“Are they all stupid?” Siegfried said. “I don’t think so.”

Big-time sports programs have been shown to generate sports-related media attention for universities. Schools with Division I football programs also typically receive 8 percent more from their respective states by way of financial support, he said.

Schools with sports teams that have winning records typically see higher attendance at sports events, he said. However, they also often feel compelled to pay their coaches competitive salaries, a problem Siegfried called the “prisoner’s dilemma.”

“All that happens is they get paid more and more and more,” he said of coaches.

… without all the other unwelcome news stories swirling around the University of Miami. But with each event, the place looks more and more like a scandal-magnet.

Online education programs at community colleges and for-profit schools have “serious” vulnerability to financial-aid fraud rings, which have become a growing problem, according to letter by a government watchdog agency made public on Thursday.

… Usually a fraud operation’s ringleader will enroll one or two “straw” students in a distance-education program in exchange for a portion of the financial-aid award.

Here’s one in UD‘s neighborhood – a couple of hours ago, police announced that a man with a rifle was seen on the campus of Georgetown University Law Center.

Many of these stories turn out to be false. People saw something, but it turned out not to be a person with a weapon. Some, of course, turn out to be all too true.

***************************************

They’ve already called off the search.

On the other hand, here’s a nice urban detail for you:

In the process of their search, the police did find a gun near a tree close to campus, but they determined it was unconnected with the incident.