But for you, zero.
William Deresiewicz, in The Nation, talks about the future of university education.
Nearly all [proposed university reforms] involve technology to drive efficiency. Online courses, distance learning, do-it-yourself instruction: this is the future we’re being offered. Why teach a required art history course to twenty students at a time when you can march them through a self-guided online textbook followed by a multiple-choice exam? Why have professors or even graduate students grade papers when you can outsource them to BAs around the country, even the world? Why waste time with office hours when students can interact with their professors via e-mail? … [But learning] isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement — the leading forth of new ideas and powers — that can happen only in a seminar. …It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.
*************************************
Update: From Robert Nozick’s obituary in the Harvard Gazette:
Nozick’s teaching followed the same lively, unorthodox, heterogeneous pattern as his writing. With one exception, he never taught the same course twice. The exception was “The Best Things in Life,” which he presented in 1982 and ’83, attempting to derive from the class discussion a general theory of values. The course description called it an exploration of “the nature and value of those things deemed best, such as friendship, love, intellectual understanding, sexual pleasure, achievement, adventure, play, luxury, fame, power, enlightenment, and ice cream.”
Speaking without notes, Nozick would pace restlessly back and forth, an ever-present can of Tab in his hand, drawing his students into a free-ranging discussion of the topic at hand.
He once defended his “thinking out loud” approach by comparing it with the more traditional method of giving students finished views of the great philosophical ideas.
“Presenting a completely polished and worked-out view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original work in philosophy and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it.”
Kenneth Turan reviews a Korean film whose main character, an aging woman, makes a
typically impulsive decision to take a poetry course at a local adult education center. Attracted by the hand-lettered sign that reads “You Can Be A Poet,” she finagles her way into the class and sits spellbound as the charismatic teacher tells the group “the most important thing in life is to see. Poetry is all about discovering true beauty in our everyday life.”
As she tries to write a poem, true ugliness intervenes.
[W]hat’s difficult [the character’s poetry teacher tells her] is not writing the poem but finding the heart to write one, and as Mija becomes aware of the corruption of the society she lives in, the intensity of her quest for purity and poetry increasingly impresses us.
The film’s trailer.
… UD figures universities with a penchant for sketchy money guys (Yeshiva had Ezra Merkin too) have instituted Trustee Early Warning systems so they can dump the guys before the federal government moves in for the kill.
Brown University’s TEW system must be going
UD can’t track all of these stories – the protracted litigation, the endless terrible publicity, the money that has to be found for lawyers and settlements. They’re constant, a constant feature of the modern American university.
…yet another target for his political rage.
So far, he has failed to have his way with two targets: A professor, and a playwright.
Despite Wiesenfeld’s insistence that the professor be fired for views about Israel with which Wiesenfeld strongly disagreed, the university professor was not fired. Well, he was fired, but then he was rehired because of free speech protests.
And now, it’s just been announced, the executive committee of CUNY’s trustees will shortly meet. It will almost certainly reinstate the honorary degree Wiesenfeld succeeded in withholding from Tony Kushner, another person with whom Wiesenfeld strongly disagrees.
It’s a strange, and probably really frustrating, pattern. Wiesenfeld gets his way; he gets the people purged. But then the decisions are reversed.
And why? Well, as the head of CUNY’s trustees explains:
Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name.
It’s a credit to CUNY that they appointed to the board a man whose free expression is … so remarkably free. Remarkably.
*********************************
Oh. And to make the Stalinism complete: Wiesenfeld has said he’ll forgive Kushner if Kushner will make before him a public apology for his apostasy.
Ghostwriters are the Navy Seals of academia. They go in there with their special skills and materials, write an article on behalf of their employer (a pharmaceutical company), target a professor willing to put her name on the piece so that it looks like research rather than advertising, and publish it in a high-profile journal.
Like the Seals, they are too modest – and their vocation too top-secret – to take credit. They are the unsung heroes of big pharma.
Take the wonderfully named middle man Mittleman. Maclean’s can phone her all it likes, but she ain’t talkin. Her employers wouldn’t like it. Plus she’s preparing for future missions.
A former ghost spoke to a recent gathering of academics interested in the subject. She confirmed that she would
approach academics on behalf of drug companies and withhold information about her relationship with the industry. “I was asked to identify myself as a writer for the medical education company,” she says, adding that her range of involvement with a researcher could be anything from editing a manuscript, to writing the entire thing under a researcher’s byline.
Remarkably incurious, isn’t it, for Thought Leaders not to wonder why a person would beg to write their articles for them and get them placed for them and all… I guess if you think of yourself as a really important person you figure even thinking and writing are kind of beneath you… ?
It’s such a gray area. Are you kissing an ass for huge sums of money? Or are you being paid by a government for political and economic advice?
It’s the sort of ambiguity you can’t expect Harvard professors to get anywhere with.
Luckily, there’s the DOJ.
… so at business schools.
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld is a very wealthy man – a wealth management man. He is politically powerful. He sits at the center of New York City glamor and influence.
Like Donald Trump – a very similar man – he takes these remarkable advantages and bullies other people with them.
Unlike Donald Trump, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld has a position of influence at an American university. He sits on the CUNY board of trustees.
Trump is a free agent, if you will. He can be a braggart and a bully on his own time.
(Actually, Trump has his very own university, which he runs in his very own way. Fine.)
But having taken a position of trust at a legitimate American university, Wiesenfeld was under a serious obligation to be serious about this, to discover for himself the values of universities, as well as the public demeanor expected of someone representing universities.
Wiesenfeld’s blackballing of Tony Kushner for his critical views of Israel continues to receive big national and international attention. Wiesenfeld has not only further damaged his own reputation (he already had a bad one), but he has damaged the reputation of CUNY. The story is hot – it will go on burning through CUNY for some time.
Trustees are not supposed to bring shame to a university. They are supposed to bring money, good will, and – if you’re very lucky – good oversight.
In his latest interview about denying Kushner an honorary CUNY degree, Wiesenfeld responds to a New York Times reporter’s suggestion that more care might have been taken to ascertain Kushner’s views (at least one trustee had never heard of Kushner) with this post’s headline.
Wiesenfeld to New York Times: DROP DEAD.
Seattle-area basketball star Tony Wroten will be allowed to enter the University of Washington – but only if he passes his final semester Spanish class, the Seattle Times reported Thursday… The Seattle Times reported the Athletic Director at Garfield High School, Jim Valiere, gave Wroten and classmate Valentino Coleman ‘C’ grades in an independent study Spanish class. But the class never met, didn’t have a textbook and had no coursework...
Here’s a guy, James Hood, who taught history at Tulane for decades and decades even though… well… check it out. 1.8 for Clarity… But if Rate My Professors rated lying, he’d for sure get a 5.
He and his wife and kids moved from Louisiana to Minnesota, where they got half a million dollars of state aid because they’d been displaced by Katrina and were impoverished.
Or that’s what they told the state. Actually, Professor Hood and his wife are multimillionaires with extensive property. They’re being investigated for Medical Assistance fraud.
This doesn’t reflect well on Tulane.
… you’ve already read this sort of prose.
Students at the University of Georgia interviewed their fellow students about the university’s mandatory online alcohol education course.
The student researchers found that My Student Body, the University’s online alcohol education course that students are required to complete, is considered ineffective and may actually encourage irresponsible drinking.
“Through our focus groups, we found that students felt the My Student Body course was ineffective. People thought that it was a joke,” said team leader Mary-Kerstin Lindqvist, a senior public relations and fashion merchandising major. “Our most surprising finding was that some students turned it into a drinking game and did it with friends.”
How might it be improved?
After talking to students at the University and studying alcohol education programs at other colleges, [the] researchers thought a program based on personal testimonials would be more effective.
Their research suggests the University start a program similar to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s ACE IT, which combines a theatrical performance and discussions led by older students to educate new students about alcohol.
You mean you think actual physically present people would be better than an online experience??
Tony Kushner betrays some naivety about university trustees.
Because one of CUNY’s trustees dislikes what he takes to be Kushner’s stand on Israel, the university has rescinded an honorary degree it was about to confer on him. Background here.
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who has well-established self-control issues, is the trustee who knocked out Kushner.
****************************
Update: Wiesenfeld’s been having quite the purge-party.
Earlier this year, Wiesenfeld and Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind tried to force Brooklyn College to fire an adjunct professor they believed held strongly anti-Israel views. The university initially fired the professor, Kristopher Peterson-Overton, but soon rehired him, saying it believed the criticism by Wiesenfeld and Hikind was politically motivated.