The Invisible Counterpoint

My story has occasioned a healthy amount of reaction around the web, including from TED and Chris Anderson himself. First, the snark: Maura at The Awl (a commentary site run by ex- Gawker s) calls the story “breathless” and “smug”. Most of the commentators admit that they enjoy watching TED talks anyway. I batted back with some snark of my own but also tried to answer what i took as her serious point, which was that TED seems just as elitist as the old-line institutions it’s being compared with: “I actually think we have similar concerns about elitism vs. openness. My contention is that many of the cool things that TED does spread more widely than the cool things that Harvard does, because of its attitude toward openness and its use of social media.
Harvard has a crappy open courseware site–it’s very difficult to find and view many Harvard lectures online. MIT has the best open courseware site, but even the most-watched video lectures have been watched a few hundred K times, w...

Call of Duty. Photo by Patrick h. lauke My "radical living" experiment convinced me that the things plunging students further into debt -- the iPhones, designer clothes, and even "needs" like heat and air conditioning, for instance -- were by no means "necessary." And I found it easier to "do without" than I ever thought it would be. Easier by far than the jobs I'd been forced to take in order to pay off my loans. [. . .] I refused to join those ranks. I became a deserter, an eccentric, an outsider. At Duke, I felt like an ascetic in the midst of wealth, a heretic in the Church of the Consumer. I had to hide. Because I was so paranoid about campus security finding out about my experiment, I kept myself apart from other students. Whenever I did talk with a fellow classmate, I found myself souring the conversation with preposterous lies -- lies I'd tell to protect myself. Whenever someone asked me where I lived, I'd say ...

Want Cheap Tuition? Try Yukon College Classes are small, and now it's a key outpost of climate change study. It seems an unlikely place for a college, serving a territory the size of Sweden and with a population of only 35,000. But Yukon College has made an advantage out of its smallness and remoteness. And on Wednesday of this week, it became the home of the Yukon Research Centre of Excellence, dedicated largely to studying the impact of climate change on the north. [. . .] Yukonners are famous for multi-tasking: running gold mines and tourism operations, or B&B's and security companies. Yukon College, too small to survive with a single specialty, is doing the same thing. In the process, it may teach survival skills to colleges in southern Canada as well. (Crawford Kilian, “Want Cheap Tuition? Try Yukon College,” The Tyee, Oct. 23 2009) Guys, remember to compliment you antler-head U training, with at least some courses from Princeton and MIT at itunes U. ...

VivianLea: The old tradition of scholarship is of asocial monasticism. Being in the office of someone who values the old ways, and looks at the new era of professionals expected to justify and share, to be out there, rather than all holed up, made you feel like you were in the company of a pederast -- and you may well have been. (Harold Bloom is old school, and you may have heard that Naomi Wolf accused the old sage of trying to feel her up while in his office for a chat.) It's about true nerdyness and fiddling, more than it is about leaving the genius alone to do his/her work. I'm all for finding ways to stop spending on all the big lectures (they're just a different version of a textbook) -- let's get all those from itunes U, and from preferred universities/professors from all over the world. (If all you're going to do is lecture, you'd best be good, because I'll otherwise turn to so-and-so from MIT and hear what s/he has to say, instead. Actually, I...

One comes close to sensing in this article a delight in the possibility that tuition hikes, the leveling of the middle class into the depressed poor, might bring with it an end to mass striving and the re-emergence of the aristocratic ideal. Imagine some Republic, where the elites are few and apparent; trusted to roam where they will; spared the indignity of sharing space with noisome lessers; and you will share in every conservative scholar's non-egalitarian dream. How about let's stick to the progressive plan, people. That is, one which values life enough to not ever give up on the idea of bringing to the fore, EVERY human being's beauty and genius -- not just the few stellar Obamas needed to delight, comfort, and lead the support of an aging, sagging, populace. (About institutional leadership and spirited teachers "surprising" and "shocking" their hard working, appreciate students: Five words: "Don't taze me, bro!" And maybe seven ...

If what you're most concerned about is getting smart, creative kids, you might want to direct them to school themselves by going to itunes u. It's all lectures, unfortunately --which are never as truly educative as the back-and-forth. (But many Harvard undergrad classes are just large lectures, too, though: some significant education takes place in inadequate settings.) Anyway, not just putting money into the old system but finding different ways to think of education, should be the agenda. If the next few years look like just more and more spending cuts to education, maybe just say to hell with it, and get your kids hooked on itunes U. Berkeley's there! So too MIT! They want to reach you, not wait 'til you reach them! Plus, though it's slow in motion, true, it's part of a beginning trend to challenge the for-to-long unchallengeable surrection of the institutional degree as Saint, as assured transport to respectability and the middle class. Maybe check out...