text:
The Humanities and Common Sense
**This post was originally published August 10th, 2012**
In this post, academics and university faculty will be criticized. Railing against college professors has become a common pastime, one practiced almost exclusively by those who have been taught and mentored by those whom are now being criticized. It is thus only fair to say upfront that the college education in the United States is, in spite of its myriad flaws, still of incredible value and meaning to tens if not hundreds of thousands of students every year.
That said, too much of what our faculties teach is neither interesting nor wanted by our students.
Amor Mundi Newsletter 3/9/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Anthony Grafton calls David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism "one of the saddest stories, and one of the most learned, I have ever read." Grafton knows that Anti-Judaism "is certainly not the first effort to survey the long grim history of the charges that have been brought against the Jews by their long gray line of self-appointed prosecutors." What makes this account of the long history of Jewish hatred so compelling is that Nirenberg asks the big question: Why the Jews? "[Nirenberg] wants to know why: why have so many cultures and so many intellectuals had so much to say about the Jews? More particularly, he wants to know why so many of them generated their descriptions and explanations of Jewishness not out of personal knowledge or scholarly research, but out of thin air—and from assumptions, some inherited and others newly minted, that the Jews could be wholly known even to those who knew no Jews." The question recalls the famous joke told during the Holocaust, especially amongst Jews in concentration camps. Here is one formulation of the joke from Antisemitism, the first book in the trilogy that comprises Hannah Arendt's magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism: "An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? Asks the one? Why the Jews? asks the other." Read more on the Arendt Center blog.
The SAT is Part Hoax, Part Fraud
News that the SAT is about to undergo a makeover leaves Bard College President Leon Botstein unimpressed: "The changes recently announced by the College Board to its SAT college entrance exam bring to mind the familiar phrase "too little, too late." The alleged improvements are motivated not by any serious soul searching about the SAT but by the competition the College Board has experienced from its arch rival, the ACT, the other major purveyor of standardized college entrance exams. But the problems that plague the SAT also plague the ACT. The SAT needs to be abandoned and replaced. The SAT has a status as a reliable measure of college readiness it does not deserve. The College Board has successfully marketed its exams to parents, students, colleges and universities as arbiters of educational standards. The nation actually needs fewer such exam schemes; they damage the high school curriculum and terrify both students and parents. The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a "right" answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician— and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member—pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity."
What Does the West Have to Prove?
Foreign policy types are up in arms—not over Russia's pending annexation of Crimea, but over the response in the West. By yelling loudly but doing nothing in Syria and now in the Ukraine, America and Europe are losing all credibility. The insinuation is clear. If we don't draw the line at Crimea, we will embolden Putin in Poland. Much as in the 1930s, the current NATO alliance seems unwilling to stand up for anything on principle if the costs are more than a few photo opportunities and some angry tweets. According to The American Interest, "Putin believes the West is decadent, weak, and divided. The West needs to prove him wrong." And in Politico, Ben Judah writes: "Russia's rulers have been buying up Europe for years. They have mansions and luxury flats from London's West End to France's Cote d'Azure. Their children are safe at British boarding and Swiss finishing schools. And their money is squirrelled away in Austrian banks and British tax havens.Putin's inner circle no longer fear the European establishment. They once imagined them all in MI6. Now they know better. They have seen firsthand how obsequious Western aristocrats and corporate tycoons suddenly turn when their billions come into play. They now view them as hypocrites—the same European elites who help them hide their fortunes."
In The New York Times Magazine, Siddhartha Deb profiles Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer best known in the West for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things. Though the book made Roy into a national icon, her political essays – in which she has addressed, among other issues, India's occupation of Kashmir, the "lunacy" of India's nuclear programme, and the paramilitary operations in central India against the ultraleft guerillas and indigenous populations – have angered many nationalist and upper-class Indians for their fierce critiques. Roy's most recent work, The Doctor and the Saint, is an introduction to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's famous 1936 essay "The Annihilation of Caste" that is likely to spark controversy over her rebuke of Ghandi, who wanted to abolish untouchability but not caste. How does Roy see her fiction in relation to her politics? "I'm not a person who likes to use fiction as a means," she says. "I think it's an irreducible thing, fiction. It's itself. It's not a movie, it's not a political tract, it's not a slogan. The ways in which I have thought politically, the proteins of that have to be broken down and forgotten about, until it comes out as the sweat on your skin." You can read Deb's profile of Roy here, and an excerpt from The Doctor and the Saint here.
Comparing the MOOC and the GED, Michael Guerreiro wonders whether participants approach both programs with the same sense of purpose. The answer, he suspects, is no: "The data tells us that very few of the students who enroll in a MOOC will ever reach its end. In the ivy, brick, and mortar world from which MOOCs were spun, that would be damning enough. Sticking around is important there; credentials and connections reign, starting with the high-school transcript and continuing through graduate degrees. But students may go into an online course knowing that a completion certificate, even offered under the imprimatur of Harvard or UPenn, doesn't have the same worth. A recent study by a team of researchers from Coursera found that, for many MOOC students, the credential isn't the goal at all. Students may treat the MOOC as a resource or a text rather than as a course, jumping in to learn new code or view an enticing lecture and back out whenever they want, just as they would while skimming the wider Web. For many, MOOCs may be just one more Internet tool or diversion; in the Coursera study, the retention rate among committed students for a typical class was shown to be roughly on par with that of a mobile app. And the London Times reported last week that, when given the option to get course credit for their MOOC (for a fee), none of the thousand, or so students who enrolled in a British online class did." A potent reminder that while MOOCs may indeed succeed and may even replace university education for many people, they are not so much about education as a combination of entertainment, credential, and manual. These are important activities each, but they are not what liberal arts colleges should be about. The hope in the rise of MOOCs, as we've written before, is that they help return college to its mission: to teach critical thinking and expose students to the life of the mind.
The Afterlife of the American University
Noam Chomsky, speaking to the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers, takes issue with the idea that the American university was once living and is now undead, and seeks a way forward: "First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a "golden age." Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. These are not radical ideas."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog Anna Metcalfe examines the multi-dimensional idea of action which Arendt discusses in The Human Condition. And in the Weekend Read, entitled 'Why the Jews?', Roger Berkowitz delves into anti-Judaism and its deeply seated roots in Western civilization.
Featuring Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
Bard College partners with five local libraries for six weeks of activities, performances, and discussions scheduled throughout the Hudson Valley.
Learn more here.
'What Europe? Ideals to Fight for Today'
The HAC co-sponsors the second annual conference with Bard College in Berlin
March 27-28, 2014
ICI Berlin
Learn more here.
Juvenile U
At Duke University and the University of North Carolina, two highly popular professors have transformed their course Think Again: How to Reason and Argue into a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) that is taken by 170,000 people from all over the world at one time. This is old news. There is nothing to worry about when hundreds of thousands of people around the world watch flashy lectures by top professors on how to think and argue. Better such diversions than playing Temple Run. There are advantages and benefits from MOOCs and other forms of computer learning. And we should not run scared from MOOCs.
But the alacrity with which universities are adopting MOOCs as a way of cutting costs and marketing themselves as international brands harbors a danger too. The danger is not that more people will watch MOOCs or that MOOCs might be used to convey basic knowledge inside or outside of universities. No, the real danger in MOOCs is that watching a professor on your Ipad becomes confused with education.
You know elite universities are in trouble when their professors say things like Edward Rock. Rock, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and coordinator of Penn's online education program, has this to say about the impending revolution in online education:
We're in the business of creating and disseminating knowledge. And in 2012, the internet is an incredibly important place to be present if you're in the knowledge dissemination business.
If elite colleges are in the knowledge dissemination business, then they will over time be increasingly devalued and made less relevant. There is no reason that computers or televisions can't convey knowledge as well or even better than humans. Insofar as professors and colleges imagine themselves to be in the "business of creating and disseminating knowledge," they will be replaced by computers. And it will be their own fault.
The rising popularity of MOOCs must be understood not as a product of new technology, but as a response to the failure of our universities. As Scott Newstock has argued, the basic principle behind MOOCs is hardly new. Newstock quotes one prominent expert who argues that the average distance learner "knows more of the subject, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom." Indeed, "the day is coming when the work done [via distance learning] will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our colleges." What you might not expect is that this prediction was made in 1885. "The commentator quoted above was Yale classicist (and future University of Chicago President) William Rainey Harper, evaluating correspondence courses." What Newstock's provocation shows is that efforts to replace education with knowledge dissemination have been around for centuries. But they have failed, at least until now.
MOOCs are so popular today because of the sadly poor quality of much—but certainly not all—college and university education. Around the country there are cavernous lecture halls filled with many hundreds of students. A lone professor stands up front, often with a PowerPoint presentation in a darkened room. Students have their computers open. Some are taking notes, but many are checking Facebook or surfing the Internet. Some are asleep. And others did not bother to show up, since the professor has posted his or her lecture notes online so that students can just read them instead of making the effort to make it to class. Such lectures may be half-decent ways to disseminate knowledge. Some lectures are better than others. But not much learning goes on in such lectures that can't be simply replicated more efficiently and maybe even better on a computer. It is in this context that advocates of MOOCs are correct. When one compares a large lecture course with a well-designed online course, it may very well be that the online course is a superior educational venture. That it is cheaper too makes the advance of MOOCs seemingly inevitable.
As I have written here before, the best argument for MOOCs is that they may finally put the large and impersonal college lecture course out of its misery. There is no reason to be nostalgic for the lecture course. It was never a very good idea. Aside from a few exceptional lecturers—in my world I can think of the reputations of Hegel, his student Eduard Gans, Martin Heidegger, and, of course, Hannah Arendt—college lectures are largely an economical way to allow masses of students to acquire basic introductory knowledge in a field. If the masses are now more massive and the lectures more accessible, I'll accept that as progress.
What this means is that there is an opportunity, at this moment, to embrace MOOCs as a disruptive force that will allow us to re-dedicate our universities and colleges to the practice of education as opposed to the business of knowledge dissemination. What colleges and universities need to offer is not simply knowledge, but education.
"Education," as Martin Luther King wrote, "must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking." Quick and resolute thinking requires that one "think incisively" and "think for one's self." This "is very difficult." The difficulty comes from the seduction of conformity and the power of prejudice. "We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda." We are all educated into prejudgments. They are human and it is inhuman to live free from prejudicial opinions and thoughts. On the one hand, education is the way we are led into and brought into a world as it exists, with its prejudices and values. And yet, education must also produce self-thinking persons, people who, once they are educated and enter the world as adults, are capable of judging the world into which they been born. (I have written more about King's thoughts on education here).
In her essay "The Crisis in Education," Hannah Arendt writes that education must have a double aspect. First, education leads a new young person into an already existing world. The world is that which is there before the child was born and will continue to exist after the child dies. It is the common world of things, stories, and experiences in which all of us spend our lives. All children, as newcomers who are born into a world that is at first strange to them, must be led into the already existing world. They must be taught to speak a common language, respect common values, see the same facts, and hear the same stories. This common world is what Arendt calls the "truth… we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us." In its first aspect, then, education must protect the world from "the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation." This is the conservationist function of education: to conserve the common world against the rebelliousness of the new. And this is why Arendt writes, "Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it."
At the same time, however, there is a second aspect of education that seeks to afford the child "special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world." The teacher must nurture the independence and newness of each child, what "we generally call the free development of characteristic qualities and talents… the uniqueness that distinguishes every human being from every other." The teacher must not simply love the world, but as part of the world in which we live, the teacher must also love the fact—and it is a fact—that the world will change and be transformed by new ideas and new people. Education must love this transformative nature of children, and we must "love our children enough" so that we do not "strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world." Alongside its conservationist role, education also must be revolutionary in the sense that it prepares students to strike out and create something altogether new.
Now is the time to use the disruption around MOOCs to rethink and re-invigorate our commitment to education and not simply to the dissemination of knowledge. This will not be easy.
A case in point is the same Duke University Course mentioned above, "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue." In a recent article by Michael Fitzgerald, the Professors— Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke and Ram Neta of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill— describe how teaching their MOOC led them to radically re-conceive how they teach in physical university classrooms. Here is Fitzgerald:
"The big shift: far fewer in-class lectures. Students will watch the lectures on Coursera beginning Monday. "Class will become a time for activities and also teamwork," said Sinnott-Armstrong. He's devised exercises to help on-campus students engage with the concepts in the class, including a college bowl-like competition, a murder mystery night and a scavenger hunt, all to help students develop a deeper understanding of the material presented in the lectures. "You can have these fun activities in the classroom when you're not wasting the classroom time with the lectures," he said."
What we see here is that the mass appeal of MOOCs and their use as a way of replacing lectures is not being seized as an opportunity to make education more serious, but as an excuse to make college more fun. That professors at two of this country's elite universities see it as progress that classes are replaced by murder mystery games and scavenger hunts is evidence of a profound confusion between education and infotainment. I have no doubt that much can be learned through fun and games. Children learn through games and it makes all the sense in the world that Finland allows children in schools to play until they are seven or eight years old. Even in primary or at times in secondary school, simulations and games may be useful. But there is a limit. Education, at least higher education, is not simply fun and games in the pursuit of knowledge.
As Arendt understood, education requires that students be nurtured and allowed to grow into adults who think for themselves in a serious and engaged way about the world. This is one reason Arendt is so critical of reformist pedagogy that seeks to stimulate children—especially older children in secondary schools and even college—to learn through play. When we teach children a foreign language through games instead of through grammar or when we make them learn history by playing computer games instead of by reading and studying, we "keep the older child as far as possible at the infant level. The very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults, the gradually acquired habit of work and of not-playing, is done away with in favor of the autonomy of the world of childhood." The same can be said of university courses that adopt the juvenile means of primary and secondary education.
The reasons for such a move to games in the classroom are many. Games are easy, students love them, and thus they fill massive classes, leading to superstar professors who can command supersized salaries. What is more, games work. You can learn a language through games. But games rarely teach seriousness and independence of thought.
The rise of MOOCs and the rise of fun in the college classroom are part of the trend to reduce education to a juvenile pursuit. One hardly needs an advanced degree to oversee a scavenger hunt or prepare students to take a test. And scavenger hunts, as useful as they may be in making learning fun, will hardly inculcate the independence of mind and strength of character that will produce self-thinking citizens capable of renewing the common world.
The question of how to address the crisis in education today—the fact that an ever more knowledgeable population with greatest access to information than at any time in the history of the world is perhaps the most politically illiterate citizenry in centuries—is the theme of the upcoming Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis." In preparation for the conference, you can do nothing better than to re-read Hannah Arendt's essay, "The Crisis in Education." You can also buy Between Past and Future the book of essays in which it appears. However you read it, "The Crisis in Education" is your weekend read.
Amor Mundi 9/8/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Balancing Solitude and Society
It is a new year, not only for Jews celebrating Rosh Hashanah but also for hundreds of thousands of college and university students around the world. Over at Harvard, they invited Nannerl O. Keohane—past President of Wellesley College—to give the new students some advice on how to reflect upon and imagine the years of education that lay before them. Above all, Keohane urges students to take time to think about what they want from their education: "You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you've never been busier in your life, and that's probably true; but most of you have "time" in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it's not competing with something else. You won't have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you'll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change."
Robin Kelly, writing on the 1963 March on Washington and the March's recent fiftieth anniversary celebrations, zooms out a little bit on the original event. It has, he says, taken on the characteristics of a big, feel good event focused on Civil Rights and directly responsible for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, when, in fact, all those people also came to Washington in support of economic equality and the gritty work of passing laws was accomplished later, with additional momentum and constraints. It's important to remember, he says, that "big glitzy marches do not make a movement; the organizations and activists who came to Washington, D. C., will continue to do their work, fight their fights, and make connections between disparate struggles, no matter what happens in the limelight."
Robinson Meyer investigates what, exactly, poet Seamus Heaney's last words were. Just before he passed away last week at 74, Heaney, an Irish Nobel Laureate, texted the Latin phrase noli timere, don't be afraid, to his wife. Heaney's son Michael mentioned this in his eulogy for his father, and it was written down and reported as, variously, the correct phrase or the incorrect nolle timore. For Meyer, this mis-recording of the poet's last words is emblematic of some of the transcriptions and translations he did in his work, and the further translations and transcriptions we will now engage in because he is gone. "We die" Meyer writes, "and the language gets away from us, in little ways, like a dropped vowel sound, a change in prepositions, a mistaken transcription. Errors in transfer make a literature."
Jay Rosen, who will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center's NYC Lecture Series on Sunday, Oct. 27th at 5pm, has recently suggested that journalism solves the problem of awayness - "Journalism enters the picture when human settlement, daily economy, and political organization grow beyond the scale of the self-informing populace." C.W. Anderson adds that "awayness" should include alienation from a moment in time as well as from a particular place: "Think about how we get our news today: We dive in and out of Twitter, with its short bursts of immediate information. We click over to a rapidly updating New York Times Lede blog post, with it's rolling updates and on the ground reports, complete with YouTube videos and embedded tweets. Eventually, that blog post becomes a full-fledged article, usually written by someone else. And finally, at another end of the spectrum, we peruse infographics that can sum up decades of data into a single image. All of these are journalism, in some fashion. But the kind of journalisms they are - what they are for - is arguably very different. They each deal with the problem of context in different ways."
Adam Gopnik makes a case for the study of English, and of the humanities more broadly. His defense is striking because it rejects a recent turn towards their supposed use value, instead emphasizing such study for its own sake: "No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure seeking rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human existence. That's why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible. When a man makes a few billion dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to build a gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts to an English department—texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn't talk about them, at least a little, too. It's what we call civilization."
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Crisis of the Educated Citizen"
Olin Hall, Bard College
A Reflective Education
It is a new year, not only for Jews celebrating Rosh Hashanah but also for hundreds of thousands of college and university students around the world. As with all new things, there are surprises in store, some glorious and others traumatic. Over at Harvard, they invited Nannerl O. Keohane —past President of Wellesley College—to give the new students some advice on how to reflect upon and imagine the years of education that lay before them. Keohane refashioned some words she had given previously to students at Stanford and called them: "Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude."
Above all, Keohane urges students to take time to think about what they want from their education:
You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you've never been busier in your life, and that's probably true; but most of you have "time" in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it's not competing with something else. You won't have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you'll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change.
Keohane also turns to Hannah Arendt for advice. She writes:
In the fifth chapter of her powerful work of political philosophy, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discusses the connections between individuals and political communities. She notes that each human being is "distinguished from any other who is, was, and ever will be"—which is a vivid way of thinking about selfhood. Yet precisely because each of us is a distinct individual, we need speech and action to communicate; I cannot just sense instinctively what somewhat else is thinking. In speaking and acting, we "disclose ourselves" and thus expose ourselves to possible misunderstanding or exploitation by others, but also to the rich possibilities of communication.
Speech and action, in Arendt's sense, cannot exist in isolation; they are meaningful only within human relationships. By the same token, "human nature"—as distinct from our more animal qualities—depends precisely on our capacity for speech and action: it is in fact through speech and action that each of us constitutes our self. This is Arendt's distinctive contribution to our discussion of self-fashioning: the self is created not by each of us as individuals in isolation, but through the activities we share with other human beings—language, creativity, striving, politics. If your goal is to fashion a worthwhile self, you should be mindful of your surroundings and choose companions and activities that will give you opportunities to develop your language, creativity, striving, and politics in more depth.
Keohane is right that Arendt understands the fashioning of our public selves to take place through speech and action with others. The self that is created as a public self—the self that is spoken of in the public sphere—is created through the activities we share with other human beings.
At the same time, Arendt is clear that the emergence into public life of a unique self must be nurtured in the private realm. This is especially true for children, who must be protected against the public world. Children, she writes, "must be protected against the world," which is why the child's "traditional place is in the family, whose adult members daily return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls." Education, Arendt insists, is not an activity of the public sphere and the world, but requires a "secure place, without which no living being can thrive." For Arendt, children must develop outside the "merciless glare of the public realm." Only then can they develop individually and uniquely into plural and independent persons. In order that there be a public world of plurality, we need a private world of solitude and darkness. "Everything that lives," Arendt writes, "emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all."
Keohane too embraces the importance of solitude in education, arguing that a reflective education must have a double aspect, looking both inwards in solitude and outwards towards society. She enlists Thoreau and Montaigne in the defense of solitude, even as she insists that a liberal arts education has, in the end, "education for citizenship."
At a time when democracy is passionately sought by people in countries around the world, and countries that have long enjoyed democracy are struggling to sustain it against multiple pressures, education for citizenship is one of the most powerful arguments for a liberal-arts education.
What Arendt argues, however, is that what makes education supportive of citizenship is precisely its inculcation of the virtues of solitude. Only the person who knows himself and thinks for himself and thus is inured to the sway of society and social pressures is, in Emerson's words, qualified to enter the public forum.
Precisely this question of what does it mean to educate citizens today, and how we are to respond to the crisis of apathetic yet educated citizens, underlies the upcoming Arendt Center Conference: Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis. The Conference takes place Oct. 3-4 at Bard College. And is open to the public. For now, take a look at Keohane's speech. It is your weekend read.
Amor Mundi – 8/25/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Peter Maass on the Surveillance State
How does the rise of a secret, inscrutable, and unaccountable security bureaucracy in the United States impact law-abiding citizens? This is a crucial question as many of us struggle to understand the domestic spying programs unveiled by Edward Snowden. In one such program, Xkeyscore, low-level NSA analysts are permitted to "mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed." It is arguably true that the government needs to be able to act in extraordinary ways to protect the country at a time of world terrorism. It is equally true, however, that once such information is available and held by the government, it is likely that it will be abused. Information is easily transferred. If the government collects and holds data on citizens, that data will eventually be misused, whether by the government or others. One case in point is Laura Poitras. In Peter Maass' must-read cover story in last week's New York Times Magazine, he tells how since 2006 Poitras has been on government watch lists because of rumors falsely spread about her. While winning awards and producing lauded documentaries, she was repeatedly detained, met with armed guards, and had her computers and notes taken, searched, and held for weeks—because of secret and ultimately false rumors. And all before she got involved with Edward Snowden. Now Poitras—who has helped to bring Snowden's revelations about the illegal excesses of government surveillance to light in a responsible manner—may never be able to enter the United States again without being harassed and arrested. It is important to balance the need for security against the rights of citizens and the essential American right of free speech and meaningful dissent. But how did it happen that the Attorney General of the United States of America had to write to the President of Russia assuring him that if Snowden were extradited to the U.S. he would not be tortured? As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, when he turned himself in after publishing the Pentagon papers, he was freed on bond pending trial. Would the Obama administration's justice department have treated Snowden that way? There is in the end a fine line separating the surveillance of terrorists and the harassment of citizens. Maass' article sheds light on the surveillance state through the personal story of one woman. Wherever you come down on the question of national security surveillance, it is an essay that you should read.
"In America, It is Always a Paranoid Time"
Laura Miller reviews Jesse Walker's new short history of American conspiracy theories, For Walker, the conspiracy theory is a kind of national past time, with some conspiracy or another widely discussed within many disparate demographics. Miller delves into why this might be: "As Walker sees it, our brains are predisposed to see patterns in random data and to apply stories to explain them, which is why conspiracy theory can be so contagious. Although conspiracies do exist, we need to be vigilant against our propensity to find them whether they are there or not. The most sensible outlook would appear to be that of Robert Anton Wilson, who concluded that "powerful people" could well be "engaged in criminal plots" but who found it unlikely that "the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently." Or, I would add, of covering them up effectively."
President Obama gave a speech this week promising to take on university tuition. It is a worthy goal at a time of skyrocketing student debt. But the devil is in the details and here the details include a universal assessment board that will rank how well schools prepare students for employment. The idea is to allow students and parents to know which schools are the best return on their investment and to shame colleges and universities into cutting costs and focusing more on preparing students for gainful employment. There are many questions that could be asked, including whether we are better served spending money to make college more affordable or by actually turning high school—which is already free and mandatory—into a meaningful experience that prepares students for work and citizenship? But philosophical questions aside, does such assessment work? Not according to Colin Macilwain, writing in the Scientific Journal Nature. Discussing "Snowball," a system designed to assess British Universities, Macilwain writes: "A major problem with metrics is the well-charted tendency for people to distort their own behaviour to optimize whatever is being measured (such as publications in highly cited journals) at the expense of what is not (such as careful teaching). Snowball is supposed to get around that by measuring many different things at once. Yet it cannot quantify the attributes that society values most in a university researcher — originality of thinking and the ability to nurture students. Which is not the same as scoring highly in increasingly ubiquitous student questionnaires." As assessments become a way of life, it is important to recall their unintended ill-effects.
In an essay about the ways that Iran's regime has used the deaths of "martyrs" to political advantage in the past and how opponents of the regime used that same rhetoric to push the opposite way following the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in 2009, Mehdi Okasi describes his own youthful push back as an American-Iranian visiting Tehran as a teenager: "I ignored my family's warnings, and carried my copy of The Satanic Verses with me throughout Tehran: to coffee shops, internet cafes, even the park. I held it in my hand as I walked around the city, placed it on tables as I ordered in restaurants, or on the counter at the local bakery where my sweet tooth was placated daily by cream pastries layered with jam and rolled in crushed pistachios. I even made a point of opening it in view of police and soldiers. But to my disappointment, no one paid me any attention. When I visited the many bookstores around Engelob Square, I asked booksellers if they had a copy squirreled away. My question didn't inspire rage or offense. They didn't gasp in disbelief or chase me out the store with a broom. Instead, in a rather bored tone, they informed me that the book wasn't available in Iran. When they learned that I was visiting from America, they added that I could probably find a copy at so-and-so's bookstore. Like anything else that was forbidden, you only had to know where to look and how to ask for it."
Ta-Nehisi Coates has spent part of the summer learning French in Paris. His continuing education in a foreign tongue, and his decision to pursue that education in a place where that language has spoken, has revealed to him the arrogance of native speakers of English; Coates tells his friends that he wishes more Americans were multilingual and "they can't understand. They tell me English is the international language. Why would an American need to know anything else?" For his own part, Coates seems to have been dissuaded of that particular notion simply by venturing into the world outside of his door; humility and empathy have been his prizes. "You come to this place" he says "and find yourself disarmed. You see that it has its own culture, its own ages and venerable traditions, that the people do not tremble before you. And then you understand that there is not just intelligent life in outer space, but life so graceful that it shames you into silence."
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Crisis of the Educated Citizen"
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Transformation of the Intangible
Everything that is, must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own…
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The book is under attack. A recent article in The New Atlantis begins by calling the book "modernity's quintessential technology," but reports that "now that the rustle of the book's turning page competes with the flicker of the screen's twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer," and asks "If it isn't — if we choose to replace the book…what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?" The book's future at the university is also uncertain. Even as student surveys consistently show preference for the "real thing," a shift of emphasis towards the e-text is discernible in library catalogs and, increasingly, basic course requirements. Since 2009, roughly thirty major universities have joined a pilot program requiring the purchase of e-text in lieu of textbooks for select courses.
The challenge for those driven to distraction by these developments is to articulate, in reasonably urgent and suitably political terms, what might otherwise seem a vague and idiosyncratic sense of loss—loss of depth and of a world—in an age of digital information. To this purpose, Christine Rosen in the aforementioned article quotes Hannah Arendt: "The printed book is the 'transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things,' as Hannah Arendt put it; it is imagined and lived action and speech turned into palpable remembrance."
The quote comes from a section of Arendt's The Human Condition called "The Thing-Character of the World." There Arendt distinguishes the products of labor, work, and action in their distinct roles in the making of the world. What distinguishes the first two—the products of labor and work—is that while the former (e.g. "a bread"), being "needed by our bodies…but without stability," are destined to "appear and disappear" through "incessant consumption," the latter (e.g. "a table"), "Viewed as part of the world…guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all." Though the products of work "wear" over time through use, they do not regularly "disappear"—indeed, Arendt says later in The Human Condition that without their stability the human artifice "could never be a reliable home for men"; that without the fabrication of houses, chairs, tables, tools, bridges and the like—the world would assume "the sublime indifference of untouched nature," and our dwelling within it (to the extent that such a term would be appropriate) would mean substantially less.
The products of work, in turn, bear a special relationship to "the 'products' of action and speech, which together constitute the fabric of human relationships and affairs." Because the latter "do not 'produce,' bring forth anything…In order to become worldly things…they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things—into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments." Human remembrance of action and speech may sustain the "factual world of human affairs" for a short while, but ultimately "The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent," things which survive long after the act and actor.
Seeing all this, the problem of books remains a perplexing one—for on one hand, if the written word simply compensates for the frailty of human remembrance, might a digital text serve the same purpose? On the other hand, if standard mass produced books hardly qualify as singular "works of art" (which Arendt calls "the most intensely worldly of all tangible things" because they endure both despite and because they have no use value) our only alternative is to accord books the same status as Arendt's "chair," a worldly artifact which stays in the world not only because it is durable, but because it is useful. This, however, only begets the original question of why use the book in the first place, rather than a digital copy? Absent any rare or singular artistic value to a particular volume, there seems no clear reason to preserve the book. To exit this conundrum, it seems one must explain why reification of the word in particular into a tangible thing is important.
In a recent article in Philosophy and Literature Jonathan Brent offers one answer. He writes that "'Content' is not simply 'content.' It has a form and a wrapper. If we do not recognize this, we risk making a fundamental mistake." Books, says Brent, with their "spines, headbands, prefaces (and sometimes postfaces), appendices, running feet, footnotes, headnotes, shoulders...heads…[and] tails," are not only "'content' but…unique embodiments and transmitters of a life beyond themselves[.]"
Moreover "The characters, of which words are made, are not a graven image but engraved images made originally with an instrument that in Greek was called a kharakter." Thus the covenant between God and Abraham and his descendants—a sentence—"cuts into us at the point where the flesh and word become one." In the same spirit, one might add, did God give unto Moses "two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God."
For Arendt, the reification of words serves a purpose less reliant on the rugged idea of kharacter, and more on Brent's colorful sense of "form and wrapper." Indeed, for Arendt it is precisely the "form and wrapper" which give the ordinary products of work—the useful but otherwise expendable artifacts of the world—a far more profound and ultimately political importance:
"The man-made world of things," Arendt concludes Section 23 of The Human Condition ("The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art," and the last section of the chapter on "Work"), "the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and actions, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use." In other words, notwithstanding that the durable objects of the world first exist, and then persist in the world largely because of their use value, in appearing before humans they also achieve a value and meaning independent of instrumental concerns—a value and meaning in and of themselves. Arendt prepares this point some lines earlier: "Everything that is," she writes, "must appear, and nothing can appear without a shape of its own; hence there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen. By the same token, namely, its sheer worldly existence, everything also transcends the sphere of pure instrumentality…are judged not only according to the subjective needs of men but by the objective standards of the world where they will find their place[.]"
Here Arendt, in a manner not as apparent in her later appropriation of Kant (where she attaches judgment to the sense of taste), suggests a direct connection between the possibility for political judgment and the sense of sight. The appearance of product of work in public not only establishes the thing as thing, but engenders an aesthetic quality that transcends its use value, thus giving the world itself a firmer grounding than mere utility. Moreover, the appearance of the thing in public functions like Arendt's famous "table" which at once relates and separates humans, not only in space, but also (as Arendt's own desk continues to do in the classroom at Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center) across time. In the case of books, it is not only the physical binding that appears in public, but just as importantly the great words and deeds contained within in which, through the tangible presence of the book, also enter the everyday world of appearances.
Hannah Arendt, as is well known, was a student of Martin Heidegger. In his essay "The Thing" Heidegger wrote that "the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter." Furthermore "thing or dinc…is suited as no other word to translate properly the Roman word res, that which is pertinent, which has a bearing," as in res publica which means, "not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public." In this context Heidegger warned that while "Thinging is the nearing of the world," the "frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness." The abolition of all distances fashioned by modern technology, in other words, threatens to eliminate the minimal distance required for things to appear in public in a manner that is both in-between and connecting of individuals. Thus, Heidegger warned, at a time in which "All distances in time and space are shrinking," and man receives "instant information" and witnesses "the abolition of every possibility of remoteness," the paradoxical result will be "the failure of nearness to materialize in consequence of the abolition of all distances[.]"
Such passages evoke a famous moment in The Human Condition previously alluded to, where Arendt writes that "To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time." Books—old-fashioned, time faded, coffee-stained books—are part of that world of things that, like Arendt's table, constitute the in-between that relates and separates men. Seen through the lens of Heidegger and Arendt, the problem facing the digital age—of which the vanishing of books is but one exemplary form—is whether the world itself, and the worldly in-between with its attendant plurality mediated by things that appear and endure, can itself endure; or alternatively, whether a world is still possible, and if so what kind, among humans related and separated no longer by things, but by pixel screens and antennae.
-John LeJeune
On MOOCs; and Some Possible Futures for Higher Ed
Barely more than a year old, MITx and edX now dominate discussion about the future of higher education like nothing else I have seen in my time in Cambridge, MA. I have been teaching at MIT for more than 10 years now, and can't remember any subject touching directly on university life that came even remotely close to absorbing the attention of higher ed professionals in the region the way that edX has. From initial investments of $30 million each by the founding institutions Harvard and MIT, and each month it seems bringing announcement of new partnerships with the world's colleges & universities (27 institutions currently belong to the "X" consortium), the levels of hype and institutional buy-in have been nothing short of extraordinary.
Because of their ubiquity in the popular press, higher ed industry periodicals, and blogosphere, Massively Open Online Courses or MOOCs have become that most dangerous topic of discussion: a subject about which everybody needs to have an opinion. Such topics can unfortunately generate more heat than light, as the requirement to have and to express a point of view often means that the strongest and most extravagant opinions will claim attention and command the terms of debate. This is unfortunate if you favor the nuanced opinion or (as I do) feel genuinely ambivalent about MOOCs and the role(s) that they might play in shaping the future of higher education.
So far much of the discourse about MOOCs has tended to settle around two competing claims -- one for, one against -- that I articulated in a tweet a few months ago. Either MOOC providers are described as delivering free or low-cost quality higher education to those hard-pressed to afford it (and so performing a valuable public service); or MOOCs are understood to be selling a "lite" version of higher education to the poor while consolidating power and prestige with a few wealthy elite schools. In this dystopian view, the democratizing claims made by Udacity, Coursera and edX (the last formed of these outfits, and the only non-profit among them) are revealed instead to be essentially colonialist ones -- the colonialists, ed-tech profiteers hell-bent on thoroughly remaking the university as a crypto-corporate enterprise. MOOCs are understood to be an engine in this transformation, and an integral part of an overall design for reshaping higher education as a neoliberal market pursuit.
I can't doubt that there is truth in both of these sets of claims. It is difficult at the same time to ignore that arguments for and against MOOCs look past each other in crucial respects; and leave precious little ground between them. What the accounts do share is an assumption that MOOCs will transform or "revolutionize" the landscape of higher education (for good or ill). Either MOOCs will be agents for elevating some in the less advantaged and underserved corners of the world; or MOOCs are instruments for extracting bodies from classrooms and tenure-track lines from university departments. The somewhat high-flown claims to educate and elevate underserved populations of the globe, often based on stray anecdote, are offered independently of any more substantive claim about the specific learning communities who benefit (or stand to benefit) from MOOCs. Similarly, claims about the profit motives animating the companies offering MOOCs subordinate all discussion of MOOCs to the ideological positions that they supposedly exist to promote. The designs attributed to MOOCs, and to the instructors who offer MOOCs, are such as foreclose discussion rather than promote it.
While both accounts of MOOCs envision significant future consequences from their implementation, moreover, neither says very much about actually-existing MOOCs. The MOOC has become a repository for utopian and dystopian narratives about the present and future directions of higher ed. As a result, this or that fact about MOOCs is often considered (or not) insofar as it confirms the prevailing theory about them. 150,000 signing up for a class demonstrates a clear hunger on the part of many across the globe for access to a quality education; this fact authorizes enlarged claims for the ability to transform higher education by bringing MOOCs to the masses. Similarly, the replicability of the digital medium -- and the fact that course content such as video lectures, once made, do not necessarily need to be re-made each year -- is conceived as a key to how MOOCs will force everyone in higher ed to make do (not do more) with less: less student-faculty interaction, fewer tenure-track professors, down the road the prospect of fewer instructors (the majority of them adjuncts already) paid to teach in college classrooms.
In addition to fears that MOOCs will reinforce ongoing trends of budget cuts, adjunctification and layoffs of college teaching staff, another legitimate concern is that MOOCs will—by helping some schools with their branding strategies—have the effect of consolidating elite privilege with a few schools and the "superprofessors" (themselves overwhelmingly white and male) who teach MOOCs, leaving other lesser-ranked schools struggling to compete against a lower-priced virtual curriculum. The fear is that MOOCs will facilitate the emergence of two tiers in higher ed offerings: the "real" version, available only to the students whose families can afford the exorbitant tuition, or who survive by taking out massive student loan debts); and the second-rate online version. With proposals on the table such as California's Senate Bill 520, which would grant college credit for certain approved online courses, and Coursera's recent announcement that they will sell their MOOCs to 10 public universities in the US, these fears are unfortunately very real. I hope to see more MOOCs spring up to contest that sense of inevitable recentering of authority from within the elite universities that host them. However difficult the task may prove to be, we need to disentangle the genuinely democratizing outreach work done by online education from its re-inscription of elite privilege.
These are important and pressing concerns. By the same token, they hardly exhaust all that can be said about MOOCs today. A host of important questions about the creation and implementation of MOOCs -- about course content, mode of learning, assessment, and so on -- should not be lost amidst conversations about the larger tendency (whether benevolist and democratizing, or insidious and corporatizing) to which MOOCs properly belong. The movement of classroom tasks and functions online learning presents opportunities as well as risks; we should understand both. In an essay written late last year I tried to look without blinders at MOOCs, and to reflect both on the risks associated with their format and implementation as well as on their potential as instruments of learning and encounter. I wrote at the time that it wasn't my intention "to defend the MOOC so much as...to hold open some alternative futures for it." For these alternative futures to emerge there needs to be vision, will, and coordinated effort on the part of many in higher ed. I am still willing at least to entertain the possibility that MOOCs may turn out to be an enabling, positive invention, while I acknowledge indicators that point in the direction of their being a lamentably misguided one. But the rush to condemn and dismiss online courses may be as fundamentally mistaken as the rush to anoint them the future of higher education.
Blended learning modes present opportunities for both pedagogical experimentation and outreach; neither opportunity should I think be dismissed lightly. I have heard many instructors of MOOCs (in both STEM and humanities subjects) remark that the experience of teaching online has transformed their thinking and approach to teaching familiar material in the traditional classroom -- whether in pace and timing, course content, evaluation and assessment, etc. My interest in MOOCs extends to how the format can be imagined to provide access to a university curriculum to populations that may not have had this kind of access, as this is the population that stands to gain most from them. But in addition to the flat, global learning community ritually invoked as the audience for MOOCs, we could benefit from thinking locally too. How can the online course format make possible new relationships not only with the most far-flung remote corners of the earth but with the neighborhoods and communities nearest to campus? Can we make MOOCs that foster meaningful links with the community or create learning communities that cut across both the university and the online platform?
Among other alternative futures for MOOCs, I imagine more opportunities to collaborate with colleagues at other institutions. The single-delivery, "sage on stage" MOOC is no more the only online model available than is the large lecture class at a brick-and-mortar school. While MOOCs are still for the most part free and non credit-bearing, we should try out (and generate metrics to assess) as many different teaching arrangements as possible. I hasten to add that this exploration should include the intellectual freedom along with the technological affordances to create a MOOC of any kind, at any time, with anybody. With instructors and modules selected in advance, some infrastructural support in each site, and a set of shared principles for continuity of curriculum and presentation, anybody could create a MOOC. Universities like Penn have already begun asking faculty to sign non-compete agreements, presumably to curb these kind of collaborations. For as long as such arrangements are permissible, however, I would urge researchers to collaborate on MOOCs themselves. This may be a tall order; but not I think impossible.
From various quarters we have heard recent calls for a slow-down of the MOOC bandwagon. An open letter from Harvard faculty to the Dean of Faculty of Arts & Sciences calls for more oversight and reflective engagement with the question of how MOOCs offered through edX will affect "the higher education system as a whole." I support these calls as consistent with the seriousness of the proposals to transform higher ed that are currently before us. From my modest position within the ranks of MIT administration I have been glad to see great care on the part of faculty to ensure that a spirit of experimentation and exploration with regard to MOOCs remains compatible with the core principles of the university and with a residential education. Cathy Davidson at Duke will in January 2014 teach a MOOC with Coursera simultaneously combined with a brick-and-mortar course on "The History and Future of Higher Ed," with participation from classes at other schools and universities as well. These and other movements are to me reassuring signs, indicators of collaborative engagement around a topic of great importance. They indicate a willingness too to eschew rehearsing polarized opinions for or against MOOCs in order to attend at once to their innovative construction and to their effective and responsible implementation. The challenge is to remind ourselves periodically to think small (locally, incrementally) at the same time that we heed calls to think big.
-Noel Jackson
MOOCs: The Debate Continues
After months in which university after university signed on to the bandwagon for Massive Open Online Courses called MOOCs, the battle over the future of education has finally begun. This week Duke University pulled out of EdX, the Harvard/MIT led consortium of Massive Open Online Courses called MOOC's.
The reason: Its faculty rebelled. According to The New York Times,
While [Duke provost Peter] Lange saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long-term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses — and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty.
The Times also reports that faculty at Amherst College, my alma mater and former employer, voted against joining EdX. Again, the faculty saw danger. My former colleagues worried that the introduction of online courses would detrimentally impact the quality and spirit of education and the small liberal arts college. They also, as our friends over at ViaMeadia report, worried that MOOCs would "take student tuition dollars away from so-called middle-tier and lower-tier" schools, pushing their colleagues at these institutions out of their jobs.
And that brings us to ground zero of the battle between the faculty and the MOOCs: San Jose State University. San Jose State has jumped out as a leader in the use of blended online and offline courses. Mohammad H. Qayoumi, the university's president, has defended his embrace of online curricula on both educational and financial grounds. He points to one course, "Circuits & Electronics," offered by EdX. In a pilot program, students in that course did better than students in similar real-world courses taught by San Jose State professors. Where nearly 40% of San Jose students taking their traditional course received a C or lower, only 9% of students taking the EdX course did. For Qayoumi and others, such studies offer compelling grounds for integrating MOOCs into the curriculum. The buzzword is "blended courses," in which the MOOCs are used in conjunction with faculty tutors. In this "flipped classroom," the old model in which students listen to lectures in lecture halls and then do assignments at home, is replaced by online lectures supplemented by discussions and exercises done in class with professors. As I have written, such a model can be pedagogically powerful, if done right.
But as attractive as MOOCs may be, they carry with them real dangers. And these dangers emerge front and center in the hard-hitting Open Letter that the philosophy department at San Jose State University has published addressed to Michael Sandel. Sandel is the Harvard Professor famous for his popular and excellent course "Justice," that has been wowing and provoking Harvard undergraduates for decades. Sandel not only teaches his course, he has branded it. He sells videos of the course; he published a book called Justice based on the course, and, most recently, created an online video version of the course for EdX. San Jose State recently became one of the first public universities in the country to sign a contract paying for the use of EdX courses. This is what led to the letter from the philosophers.
The letter begins by laying out the clear issue. The San Jose Philosophy department has professors who can teach courses in justice and ethics of the kind Sandel teaches. From their point of view, "There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching our equivalent course." In short, while some students may prefer a course with a famous Harvard professor, the faculty at San Jose State believe that they are qualified to teach about Justice.
Given their qualifications, the philosophy professors conclude that the real reason for the contract with EdX is not increased educational value, but simply cost. As they write: "We believe that long-term financial considerations motivate the call for massively open online courses (MOOCs) at public universities such as ours.
In short, the faculty sees the writing on the wall. Whatever boilerplate rhetoric about blended courses and educational benefit may be fashionable and necessary, the real issue is simple. Public universities (and many private ones as well) will not keep paying the salaries of professors when those professors are not needed.
While for now professors are kept on to teach courses in a blended classroom, there will soon be need for many fewer professors. As students take Professor Sandel's class at universities around the country, they will eventually work with teaching assistants—just as students do at Harvard, where Professor Sandel has pitifully little interaction with his hundreds of students in every class. These teaching assistants make little money, significantly less than a tenured or even a non-tenured professor. It is only a matter of time before many university classes are taught virtually by superstar professors assisted by armies of low-paid onsite assistants. State universities will then be able to educate significantly more students at a fraction of the current cost. For many students this will be a great boon—a certified and possibly quality education at a cheap price. For most California voters, this is a good deal. But it is precisely what the faculty at San Jose State fear. As they write:
We believe the purchasing of online and blended courses is not driven by concerns about pedagogy, but by an effort to restructure the U.S. university system in general, and our own California State University system in particular. If the concern were pedagogically motivated, we would expect faculty to be consulted and to monitor quality control. On the other hand, when change is financially driven and involves a compromise of quality it is done quickly, without consulting faculty or curriculum committees, and behind closed doors. This is essentially what happened with SJSU's contract with edX. At a press conference (April 10, 2013 at SJSU) announcing the signing of the contract with edX, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged as much: "The old education financing model, frankly, is no longer sustainable." This is the crux of the problem. It is time to stop masking the real issue of MOOCs and blended courses behind empty rhetoric about a new generation and a new world. The purchasing of MOOCs and blended courses from outside vendors is the first step toward restructuring the CSU.
The San Jose State philosophy professors are undoubtedly correct. We are facing a systematic transformation in higher education in this country and also in secondary education as well. Just as the Internet has revolutionized journalism and just as it is now shaking the foundations of medicine and law, the Internet will not leave education alone. Change seems nigh. Part of this change is being driven by cost. Some of it is also being driven by the failures and perceived failures of our current system. The question for those of us in the world of higher education is whether we can respond intelligently to save the good and change out the bad. It is time that faculties around the country focus on this question and for that we should all be thankful to the philosophy professors at San Jose State.
The Open Letter offers three main points to argue that it is bad pedagogy to replace them with the blended course model of MOOCs and teaching assistants.
First, they argue that good teaching requires professors engaged in research. When professors are engaged in active research programs, they are interested in and motivated by their fields. Students can perceive if a professor is bored with a class and students will always learn more and be driven to study and excel by professors who feel that their work matters. Some may wonder what the use of research is that is read by only a few colleagues around the world, but one answer is that such research is necessary to keep professors fresh and sharp. We all know the sad fate of professors who have disengaged from research.
Second, the philosophy professors accept the argument of many including myself that large lectures are not the best way to teach. They teach by the Socratic method, interacting with students. Such classes, they write, are much better than having students watch Professor Sandel engage Socratically with faculty at Harvard. Of course, the MOOC model would still allow for Socratic and personal engagement, just by much lower paid purveyors of the craft. The unanswered question is whether low-paid assistants can be trained to teach well. The answer may well be yes.
Third, the philosophy faculty worry about the exact same moral justice course being taught across the country. We can already see the disciplinary barricades being drawn. It may be one thing to teach Math to the whole country from one or two MOOCs, but philosophy needs multiple perspectives. But how many? The philosophy professors suggest that their highly diverse and often lower-middle-class students have different experiences and references than do Professor Sandel's Harvard students. They can, in the classroom, better connect with these students than Professor Sandel via online lectures.
The points the San Jose State philosophy professors raise are important. In many ways, however, their letter misses the point. Our educational system is now structured on a few questionable premises. First, that everyone who attends college wants a liberal arts education. That is simply not true. Many students simply want a credential to get a job. If these students can be taught well and more cheaply, we should help them. There is a question of whether we need to offer everyone the same kind of highly personalized and expensive education. While such arguments will be lambasted as elitist, it is nevertheless true that not everyone wants or needs to read Kant closely. We should seek to protect the ability of those who do—no matter their economic class—and also allow those who don't a more efficient path through school.
A second questionable premise is that specialization is necessary to be a good teacher. This also is false. Too much specialization removes one from the world of common sense. As I have argued before, we need professors who are educated more generally. It is important to learn about Shakespeare and Aristotle, but you don't need to be a specialist in Shakespeare or Aristotle to teach them well and thoughtfully to undergraduates. This is not an argument against the Ph.D. It is important to study and learn an intellectual tradition if you are going to teach. But it is an argument against the professionalization of the Ph.D. and of graduate education in general. It is also an argument against the dominance of undergraduate curriculum by professionalized scholars.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, is the premise that everyone needs to go to college. If we put a fraction of the resources we currently spend on remedial education for college students back into public high schools in this country, we could begin the process of transforming high school into a serious and meaningful activity. For one thing, we could begin employing Ph.D.s as high school teachers as are many of the emerging early colleges opening around the country.
I am sympathetic to the philosophy professors at San Jose State. I too teach a course on Justice called "The Foundation of Law: The Quest for Justice." It is a course quite similar and yet meaningfully different from Michael Sandel's course on Justice. I believe it is better, no offense meant. And I would be upset if I were told next year that instead of teaching my course I would be in effect a glorified TA for Professor Sandel. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I know it might.
The only response for those whose jobs are being replaced by computers or the Internet is to go out and figure out how to do it better. That is what happened to journalists who were fired in droves. Many quit voluntarily and began developing new models of journalism, including blogs that have enriched our public discourse and largely rejuvenated public journalism in this country. Blogs, of course, are not perfect, and there is the question of how to make a living writing one. But enterprising bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Walter Russell Mead are figuring that out. So too are professors like Michael Sandel and Andrew Ng.
We need educators to become experimental these days, to create small schools and intensive curricula within larger institutions that make the most of the personal interaction that is the core of true pedagogy. If that happens, and if teachers offer meaningful education for which students or our taxpayers will pay, then our jobs will be safe. And our students will be better for it. For this reason, we should welcome the technology as a push to make ourselves better teachers.
The Open Letter to Michael Sandel deserves a response. I hope Professor Sandel offers one. Until then, I recommend that this beautiful Spring weekend you read the letter from the San Jose State Philosophy Department. It is your weekend read.


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Broome Community College could soon have a new addition. The college is making progress on its plan to build dorms on the campus. And as our Melissa Kakareka tells us, they are the latest of many community colleges to make the push for residential life.
TOWN OF DICKINSON, N.Y.- Some Broome Community College students will soon be doing more than taking classes on campus. They will have the option of living there. Local and County officials toured the site of the school's proposed dorms on the east side of campus Monday. The dorms will help the school recruit athletes and attract out-of-town students. "People assume that BCC is local, students locally, but what they don't understand is that there is so many students from out of state and international students as well," said Broome County Executive Debbie Preston.
The building will be four stories and will contain about 80 apartment style rooms for approximately 300 students. The school will forward on the design portion in the coming weeks and will then look for funding. It will be bonded through the BCC Foundation. "The challenge today is the financial environment that we are in. Prior to 2008 it was easier to get favorable financing," said BCC President Kevin Drumm.
BCC isn't alone in its plan. Two-thirds of community colleges in the SUNY system have dorms, including OCC and TC3.
"It's a growing trend across the nation. I'm a community college graduate and like most students I commuted. The national figures are something like 40 percent now have dorms. It growing and will grow when we add ours," said Drumm.
For BCC students, the idea of living on campus is something to look forward to. "It would give it more of a like a campus life feel to it than it does now," said BCC student Colin Flak. "I saw the new dorms they did for BU so if it's half of what those are like it's something I would consider greatly," said BCC student Dylan Brandon. If everything goes according to plan, the college is hoping to break ground in the spring and have the dorms completed by summer 2014.
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Alexis MaxwellTalk0
this wiki
|Alexis Maxwell
|Contestant Profile
|Birth Date
|March 17, 1992
|Addison, IL
| Solana (Days 1-12)
► Aparri (Days 12-16)
|Challenge(s) Won
|Vote(s) Against
|Day(s) Lasted
Alexis Taylor Maxwell is a contestant from Survivor: Cagayan.
Name: Alexis Maxwell (21)
Tribe Designation: Solana
Current Residence: Addison, Ill.
Occupation: Student at Northwestern University
Personal Claim to Fame: Studying abroad in Ireland and visiting eight different countries while I was there. It made me more independent, adventurous and responsible.
Inspiration in Life: My mom, because she is a fearless and confident woman. My dad, because he is smart and hardworking, and my brother, because he is my role model and pushes me to be better.
Hobbies: Traveling, watching scary movies and eating.
Pet Peeves: Guys who turn into "Stage five clingers" and people who blow their nose in public.
3 Words to Describe You: Funny, flirty and smart.
If You Could Have 3 Things on The Island What Would They Be and Why? More than one bikini—I like to change it up; hair ties—I have a lot of hair and need to put it up for challenges, and a blanket.
SURVIVOR Contestant You Are Most Like: Hopefully Parvati Shallow, because she combined sex appeal with strategy and intelligence.
Reason for Being on SURVIVOR: My dad! He loves the show so much and would kill to be on it. I'm playing for both of us.
Why You Think You'll "Survive" SURVIVOR: My strongest asset is my background in psychology. I have studied and experimented with group dynamics and understand how to play a specific role in a group. I will also use sex appeal and flirting as a means of disguising my intelligence.
Why You Think You Will Be the Sole SURVIVOR: I have always been aware of my role in a group and know how to lead in a sneaky way. I will use my education and flirty personality to assure I'm always in a good position.
Do You Consider Yourself a Brain, a Beauty or a Brawn? I would consider myself a brain! I work my butt off at Northwestern and consider this an accomplishment that defines me.
Who Do You Think Has the Best Chance in the Game of Survivor: Brains, Beauty or Brawn? I would say beauties for the mere fact that they possess the least threatening label. No one would expect a beauty to be a challenge threat or a strategic player, so they enter the game with the smallest target on their back.
Survivor: CagayanEdit
Alexis Maxwell was placed on the Solana tribe for her beauty. In the first impressions vote, the tribe elected LJ McKanas the leader, who deemed Morgan McLeod the weakest member. When the tribe arrived, Morgan was at a wall of rocks. Morgan claimed that she had chosen supplies over the clue to the Hidden Immunity Idol, which was a lie. The tribe quickly got fire. At the first challenge of the season, Alexis and LJ worked on the final puzzle. They managed to overtake the brawns tribe for the first place finish and the better fire making kit. Brice Johnston viewed Alexis as the "flirt" when discussing the tribe dynamics in a confessional. At the second challenge, the beauty tribe was behind. However, they were able to finish in second due to the brains tribe's J'Tia Taylor struggling at the puzzle.
At this point, Alexis was in a comfortable four-person alliance with LJ, Jefra Bland and Jeremiah Wood. The tribe was miserable due to a constant monsoon that damaged the shelter. At the challenge, Alexis and Jefra sat out. LJ and Jeremiah botched up on the puzzle, costing Solana immunity and sending them to Tribal Council. Brice was trying to get Jeremiah to flip and vote out Alexis due to needing LJ for challenges. The alliance decided to split the vote between Morgan and Brice and vote out Brice should neither have the idol. At Tribal Council, Jeremiah ultimately stayed loyal and Brice was voted out in the revote. After Tribal Council, Morgan apologized for voting against Alexis and confronted Jeremiah about his decision. This made Alexis wary of Jeremiah. At the next reward challenge, Alexis was the caller for the challenge. Solana was able to get first place and group of chickens. Everyone was happy that they had gotten chickens but did not know how they reproduce. Alexis sat out of the immunity challenge, which the beauty tribe placed 1st.
At the next reward challenge, everyone had to drop their buffs. In a random draw of buffs, Alexis, Jeremiah and Morgan ended up with Sarah Lacina, Spencer Bledsoe, Kass McQuillen and Tasha Fox and the new Aparri tribe. Alexis competed in the second round of the challenge Alexis was on the pole. She did poorly and the new Aparri lost the challenge. Once they arrived at Aparri camp, Sarah showed everyone around. The Beauties very quickly turned on each other, giving the former members of Luzon the power of the tribe. At the immunity challenge, both tribes had to sit someone out. Alexis had to compete after winning rock-paper-scissors. Aparri was initially lagging but was able to catch-up and win.
Alexis was hoping to take Morgan to the Final Tribal Council to use as a jury goat. At the reward challenge, Alexis and Kass sat out. The new Solana won the challenge and their camp was raided by Tony Vlachos and Woo Hwang. Before they left, Woo and Tony supposedly gave Jeremiah a clue to the Hidden Immunity Idol, but the clue was actually for Solana, and they showed Jeremiah the clue only to turn the rest of Aparri against him. Jeremiah later told Alexis and Spencer the clue was for Solana, but neither believed him and Alexis told Spencer that Jeremiah had been shifting alliances. Solana won the immunity challenge, sending Aparri to Tribal Council. Although Alexis had been told Jeremiah was being voted out, the tribe was really still considering whom to vote out. Ultimately, Alexis was deemed more likely to flip than Jeremiah, and much to her shock, Alexis was unanimously voted out. Alexis walked away from the Tribal Council area in disappointment and tears.
Voting HistoryEdit
|Alexis's Voting History
| Alexis's
| Voted Against
|Solana Tribe Immune
|Solana Tribe Immune
| Brice;
| Brice, Morgan;
|Solana Tribe Immune
|Aparri Tribe Immune
|No Tribal Council
| Jeremiah, Kass, Morgan,
Sarah, Spencer, Tasha
|Voted Off, Day 16
^1 In Cops-R-Us, the vote ended with a 2-2-2 tie between Alexis, Brice and Morgan, forcing a revote. At the revote, Alexis did not receive enough votes to be eliminated.
This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.
- Alexis is the lowest placing female member of Solana.
- She is also the lowest placing member of the post-swap Aparri tribe and other only person ever voted out of the tribe.
- She is also the only female member of Solana to not make the merge.
- Both times Alexis attended Tribal Council she received votes, and each time one was from Morgan McLeod.
- Alexis was born on St. Patrick's Day and shares her birthday with Zoe Zanidakis and Mitchell Olson.
- Alexis is the only person to be voted out of the Aparri tribe.
- Alexis won the ozcar for the best pre jury boot
|Survivor: Cagayan Castaways


text:
Hang tight!
Recipe by Chef John
"The pistachio and mustard crust gives this lamb dish an interesting flavor and texture. Sure, rack of lamb is a little pricey, but no more so than other special occasion meats like prime rib, beef tenderloin, or goose. And, because rack of lamb is sold completely trimmed, you'll have virtually no waste."
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racks of lamb, trimmed
1 teaspoon
herbes de Provence
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 tablespoon
vegetable oil
2/3 cup
chopped pistachio nuts
2 tablespoons
dry bread crumbs
1 tablespoon
melted butter
1 teaspoon
olive oil
3 tablespoons
Dijon mustard
I'd give this 10 stars if I could! Throughout the whole dinner, hubby and I couldn't stop saying how much we loved this! The Herbes de Provence and pistachios totally make the dish! What an amazing combo of flavors. Few ingredients, but packed with flavor. It tastes like it's from a fancy restaurant. The cooking time is spot on. I pulled it out right at 25 mins and it was a perfect medium-rare to medium. Thank you Chef John! You really created a masterpiece which made for a perfect New Year's Day dinner! I can't wait to make this for guests.
This recipe was ok it was a bit to salty for my taste
21 Ratings
This was one of the best dishes I've ever made. I totally forgot the Herbes de
Provence mixture before browning. Served with mustard potatoes. Was told this meal was as good as any restaurant meal. Thank you!
Very nice; a lovely change for a traditional Sunday roast. I used a grainy mustard and Dijon mix to marry/transition the texture of the pistachio. Also used duck fat instead of vegetable oils.
OMG This is the best. My family could not stop raving about it. Better than a 5 star restaurant.
Absolutely phenomenal recipe. The rack of lamb came out tender and juicy and perfectly done. I think my boyfriend fell in love with me just a little more when I made this for him the other day. Better than restaurant quality! Would recommend to anyone and everyone!
DELICIOUS! I had never made lamb before so watched the video that Chef John made. It was very easy to follow and turned out amazing. Probably the best lamb I have ever had. It practically fell off the bone it was so tender!
Lamb is one of my favorite things to eat, however I was getting tired of spending a pretty penny to go eat it at a restaurant every time I had cravings. So as intimidated as I was, I decided to try this recipe. It was so simple and tasted amazing! Watching the video gave me the extra bit of courage I needed to accomplish this. The tanginess of the Dijon and the saltiness of the pistachios were a to-die-for combination! The cook time was spot on and I now have a new recipe that I'm excited to show off. I'll be making this for many years to come!
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.
Pistachio Crusted Rack of Lamb
Serving Size: 1/4 of a recipe
Servings Per Recipe: 4
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 619
Calories from Fat: 358
Rated, reviewed, and ready to satisfy your sweet cravings.
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See how to make a traditional mint-crusted lamb with honey vinaigrette.
An amazing roast rack of lamb encrusted with mustard and seasoned bread crumbs.


text:
Originally published: June 23, 2011
Last updated: June 23, 2011 - 6:03pm
[Commentary] The 'digital divide' seems wider than ever.
No, not the differences in Internet access caused by income inequality. Great strides have been made bridging that gap ever since the issue was dramatized by a photo-op of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore wiring a California high school to make sure its lower-income students had equal Web access. No, today's yawning digital divide is between left and right, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. That ideological gap -- a gulf, really -- separates the Netroots Nation and RightOnline confabs taking place in Minneapolis this weekend, almost within earshot of each other. This divide's impact is profound -- for digital media, sure, but just as much for politics, and thus for citizens, at a time when the state and the nation face enormous problems that polarization aggravates. Even media scholars and experts wonder whether digital media mirrors, or causes, these divisions.
Links to Sources
- Login or register to post comments
- Email this page
- UN agency's annual broadband report reveals gender inequalities
- Technology Widens Gap Between Rich and Poor
- ETNO seeks EC incentives to boost private network investment
- Blumenthal asks vendors to help prevent 'digital divide'
- Major 'digital divide' seen in personal health record use
- How the NAACP is Promoting Broadband Adoption
- Internet access won't fix inequality
- Tech transfers to developing world needed for sustainability
- End global inequality: become a Luddite
- Uneven efforts have left a 'digital divide' across nation
- Digital divide exacerbates US inequality
- Jesse Jackson pushes AT&T/BellSouth merger
- Technology Can Be a Tool for Student Success, and a Distraction at Home
- The Web-Deprived Study at McDonald's
- Civil Rights Groups Urge Congress to Close 'Digital Divide'


text:
USAF completes $211 million spy blimp, will immediately scrap it
The U.S. Air Force has a 370-foot-long surveillance airship sitting in a hangar in North Carolina right now, 95% complete. In two weeks, the blimp will be ready to fly, just in time for the USAF to scrap the entire program, dismantle the hardware, and pack it all into shipping containers for storage. Sigh.
Originally, the USAF wanted the Blue Devil 2 airship to fill the gap between spy satellites and spy aircraft as a medium duration surveillance system that would have the capability of keeping on station for several weeks at a time, persistently watching over a huge area from a high altitude. It's an important function, something that the Pentagon called "urgently needed" just two years ago. But the program has now officially been killed, just days before the blimp was ready to fly. What the heck happened?
The official word is that the Air Force didn't want to spend the estimated $188 million it would cost to test out the Blue Devil 2 for a year in Afghanistan. That's despite the fact that it would ultimately cost about a third as much to operate the blimp as it costs to operate fixed wing aircraft with similar capabilities. Efficiency is also why the Army will be deploying their own blimp to Afghanistan early next year: the LEMV.
It's pretty clear that blimps can fulfill a niche for the armed forces, offering capabilities such as heavy lifting and long-duration surveillance that just can't be duplicated with other assets. And this might be what eventually saves the Blue Devil 2: even though the Air Force is bailing at the last minute despite its investment of a quarter of a billion dollars, it's possible that the Navy might now step in and take over on the project based on the success it's had experimenting with much smaller blimp platforms.
If the Navy doesn't step up, though, Blue Devil 2 will be completely dismantled and prepared for storage. $350,000 worth of helium will be vented out into the atmosphere without ever having lifted anything more than a couple feet off of the ground. And we'll have taken one very large and very expensive step backwards in technology development.
Via Danger Room


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The Stylus Pro is a sleek compact pen sized, two AAA alkaline battery powered flashlight designed for use in all markets. It features a tail cap switch, momentary or constant on operation, a pocket clip for convenience, and amazing brightness and run time for a light of its size and price. The aluminum housing with Type II Military Spec anodizing helps make the light extremely durable and abrasion resistant.• CASE MATERIAL: Machined aluminum alloy case. Type II MIL-Spec anodized finish.
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NEW Titleist Oregon State Beavers Khaki Golf Cap
This cap is brand new and has never been worn and looks perfect. It is School Colors W/ "Titleist" on the front and has the signature School logo on the side. This cap also has an unstructured slouch top and an adjustable rear slide strap to fit anyone.
This cap was made exclusively for Titleist by Twins Enterprise and was made in China of 100% Cotton.
Shipping will cost $4 to the continental USA. Buyers outside this area to pay appropriate shipping cost.
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