“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, June 24, 2012

The Viriginia Unpleasantness

1. Dragas got the idea from a David Brooks op-ed piece? What the fuck?

2. The idea being to ... what? This was never ever made explicit, in particular in the minds of those who thought Doing Something was imperative.

2.a. The only Thing that has Happened has been the ouster of a particularly good president, the first woman to hole the job at UVa. 

3. Did no one check actually existing online programs? The UC one just tanked, costing about $10m (it made a loss). University of Illinois blew $120m on theirs before they pulled it. I did try to warn the UC guys before they started a couple years ago.

4. Sure, UVa could become like University of Phoenix. They accept anyone who will pay. LOL.

5. Online works if you're a superstar calc teacher or whatever and you have 200 000 students. But that's not a university anymore.

6. Private universities that are for real (Harvard, Rice, Brown, Princeton etc.) are (sorry to say) a lot less “corporate” than the public ones at this point. For instance, a majority of incoming Rice freshman two years in a row are not white. A majority are low income.

7. Dragas, do you think Jefferson et al. called y'all “Visitors” not CEOs or even managers for a reason?

1 comment:

Henry Warwick said...

I appreciate your righteous indignation, but a link to the article in question would be nice, so we could read it and add our own liter of bile and disgust.

:-)