There’s been a little spate of red-baiting going on, perhaps prefiguring the upcoming presidential election, which is probably going to be one of the ugliest in recent history.  I think it started with Allen West’s bizarre claim that the U.S. Congress is full of communists, and now Bill O’Reilly has pipped in, among others, claiming that Robert Reich, of all people, “secretly admires” Karl Marx.  There’s a rhetorical parallel here to the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ charge, in that the accusation isn’t really an accusation, but a sort of guilty–by-association smear, only no one seems willing to say that admiring Marx isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The cold war is over but the smear remains.

I don’t really have any problem saying I admire Marx anymore than I would have…

Last night I had one of those maddening Facebook arguments– I’d like to think it was a debate, but it was probably just an argument–that illustrate just how pervasive conservative ideas have become. The key phrase was, “some people are just not meant for college.”  A few hundred years ago that was the exact phrase used to justify keeping everyone  in the political dark except for white men with property. Now it’s become one of those falsely “hard-nosed” phrases that certain otherwise liberal people use to sound “realistic” and “pragmatic.”  We’d love a world in which college is affordable for all but “some people are just not meant for college.” Is it just genetics?

It’s nonsense, of course. Even as recently…

I knew a jerk once– if someone acts like this it’s fair to call him a jerk– who was so incensed about his students (possible) use of Wikipedia that he proposed a pedagogical exercise to prove how awful it was. He would purposely plant false information on the online encyclopedia and then ask his students a question in class that they would need to do research to answer. They’d go home, or to the library, presumably, punch in their question to Google, and get the planted false answer from Wikipedia. The next day in class, the professor could laugh knowingly and make an important point: Wikipedia is worthless.

This jerk– he’s still a professor as well a jerk– thought this little…

Most important, the system promotes driven and talented students who might otherwise be denied access to higher education: a kid in Afghanistan, a young mother in Scotland, an ignored pupil in Detroit. From Mr. Thrun’s class (translated into 44 languages) Udacity chose 200 students based purely on performance and, a few weeks ago, forwarded their resumes to companies including Amazon, Bank of America and BMW.

There are glitches, of course, including a high online dropout rate, complaints about speed, questions on accreditation and the predictable whining from old-school alumni who have gotten too cozy in their club chairs.

“Watching the Ivory Tower Topple“

Technological change in a capitalist economy often has a lot of hidden and important costs hidden by the marketing…

I’ve lost jobs immediately after receiving excellent assessments from both colleagues and students. In one case, one or two teachers were able to manipulate the system for their own obscure purposes. That sort of petty, narcissistic power is probably always obscure if not inexplicable. In the second case, it was administrative power run amok. That too was obscure, but my guess is that they went for whoever talked the most.

I didn’t have the power– I should say “we” didn’t have the organizational power, that is, the faculty involved didn’t have the power–to fight either case but in each case my treatment was rewarded with severance pay.  There’s no real justice, this seemed to be saying, but at least you can leave with a little money. Academia…