Romi Mayes Band: Bible
Common Sense, 2, Private Property 1
Freely available open course material could save college students in Washington state $1.2 million this year: The Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges introduced one of the country’s largest open textbook programs Oct. 31, bringing low-cost class material to 81 college courses with the highest enrollments in the state (“Students, professors laud $30 textbooks“).
One of the most interesting things about our interesting times is that certain fully naturalized ideas, for example, about private property, are changing. Even ten years ago the textbook system, which cost students millions each year and fuel some of the worse excess of the academic star system, seemed as inevitable as the ocean. It’s happening far too slowly, but the recession seems to be facilitating change.
What’s so amazing is that this is such a long, slow process, even though it can transform textbook costs from a burden of thousands of dollars each year to a manageable tens of dollars. The electronic, open-source textbooks are more easily updated and often more engaging to students. You’d think that cheap and more effective would be irresistible, but common sense struggles against the inertia of habitual profit and greed.
Dumb Memes
I am starting to believe that there must be an inverse relationship between the blunt stupidity of an idea and its longevity as a cultural meme. I’m not talking about Obama’s birth certificate and the Pentagon conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center, although those memes seem to endlessly circle around deep stinking pools of stupidly. Those are bad enough but they are just side-shows in the long run.
I’m talking about ideas that seem to quietly persist against all logic and across decades. When Reagan was elected more than 30 years ago he made his plans very clear. “Trickle-down” economics meant a sweeping redistribution of wealth from the poor, working, and middle classes, to the rich. If we give them our money, Regan said, they will give a trickle back. It’s made us all poorer but it’s an idea that just won’t die.
That’s what they did, too, as recent statistics have shown. Still, the Republican party and its “base” keep repeating the idea as if it were new and as if it were fine to give everything to the rich and then be happy with the trickle that comes back. There are lots of parallels in academia, too, dumb-as-hammer memes that seem to persist against all odds. One of the worst and dumbest academic ideas is the student evaluation.
Every year or so someone in the education press will publish yet another article explaining the “grain of truth” that we should all glean from student evaluations. We can’t do anything about them, we are told, and they will be used to assess our work, so we need to try to see what they might tell us. Never mind that they have no legitimacy as data and that they can and will be used for the usual sorts of political pettiness.
William Shatner – Bohemian Rhapsody