An interesting note is that Zimmerman has spoken up about problems of contingency previously, but in this moment is choosing to ignore this factor in his call for reform. What motivates this absence?
We are so open, in fact, to viewpoint diversity & campus speech & mirror-gazing that we are again, tomorrow, hosting our worst lying authoritarian critics on campus to lie more about all that we do wrong & paying them handsomely to do so. No other societal institutions do this on a regular basis.
Exactly right! I had a student who had transferred from the local CC who straight up remarked how disappointed they were to find out how indifferent some (not all, but some) faculty were to teaching.
Lord yes. Part of the core thesis of my higher ed book was the need to change these relationships so leadership and institutions could be more resilient, rather than having to compete for attention and prestige. The marketplace has been an unequivocally bad place for education.
Over my career I saw dozens of excellent teachers leave higher ed because they could not afford to continue to work as NTT faculty. I am a (now) internationally recognized voice on how we teach writing. I was never paid more than $35k a year. This seems like a bigger deal than being too woke.
The irony of a tenured full professor at an Ivy League university chastising his colleagues for refusing to "look in the mirror" and dismissing critics while ignoring the overwhelming factors that have led to the problems he outlines (Which I agree with!) is off the charts.
This is a call for measuring teaching effectiveness that ignores the most meaningful criteria we could use: What percentage of your faculty makes a professional wage and has a teaching load consistent with disciplinary norms? I taught college for 20 years and never achieved either.
I dunno, I managed to critique the system and lay out a vision for reorienting public higher education around a shared vision of human flourishing without having to give any credence to the clearly bad faith attacks on universities. www.amazon.com/Sustainable-...
Manages to get through a call for focusing on teaching and civic purpose without even glancing toward contingency and adjunctification of faculty as perhaps a factor in the problem. A call to change without examining the structures that control higher ed is performative B.S. at this point.
I'm having a hard time understanding the outrage over the luxury second home tax in New York. The socialist paradise of South Carolina triples your property tax if it is not your primary residence and the hoops they make you jump through to prove it's your primary residence are not small.
Being “white” I assume.
I'll simply say again that for Shlaes to resurface in The Economist at this moment is an indicator of an ambient concern that Rooseveltian policies and politics are increasingly likely. The thing about the New Deal is, it was *immensely popular.* That's terrifying to certain people
This thing looks like it’s taking a shit.
It would depend on what rights they acquired of you signed something but you almost certainly have the unilateral right to republish them in a book. At most you’d mention their place of original publication.
That Yale report on what's wrong with U.S. college saw some trees (high cost, unfair admission, etc.) but missed the forest: the 60-year right-wing crusade to undermine higher ed, from slashing budgets to stifling speech
How to really fix college. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/yale...
John is absolutely right to see the “infinite patience” for Khan’s failed EdTech creative destruction & the closure of Hampshire as linked.
EdTech has always been dependent on using grades as the foundation for A/B testing, behavioral modification (which they pretend is learning), & tokenization.
I have been bumping against a disturbing number of these people lately. They've been convinced that choosing to teach is a sign of failure and being a failure. I don't know what kind of "reform" they're talking themselves into, but I don't like it.
I mean how dare you merely go about your life teaching and then write a book with examples you think would be useful to others. Haven't you thought about spinning up a massive nonprofit to do a bunch of shit that is not that?
That comment is bonkers. Truly a broken brain.
Good lord. I had to make sure it wasn't the same person, but it isn't. There's two of them at least.
I very much appreciate this, and it's the kind of effect I've always wanted to have, but in the broader culture it's negligible, as are the voices of most teachers/instructors. To our detriment, obviously.
But Khan and Gates and the other groups invested in the Khan TED Institute are not our saviors. They're here to extract what's left of our freedoms for their own profit. Literally.
It doesn't matter that Sal Khan has been serially wrong. He's important. It doesn't matter that Bill Gates has had a pernicious effect on schools, he's rich. These figures being viewed as authorities seems like part of a larger retreat from democracy. We need these people to save us.
In this person's mind, Sal Khan obviously has greater standing to influence education than me (or any teacher/instructor) because look! This guy made this huge thing! He consults with with world leaders. He is obviously successful in ways that an individual practitioner could never be.
While I've had my share of public presence (books, etc), the reality is that Sal Khan has been on 60 Minutes twice. His book is blurbed by Bill Gates. My critic sees these things as proof of importance, of "impact." Meanwhile the less visible work of teaching writing for 20 years doesn't register.
This newsletter went live just after 6am eastern time and I've already had one email dressing me down, essentially saying, "how can you criticize Sal Khan given all he's done (Khan Academy videos, etc...). What have you done?" It's an interesting bit of evidence of how we treat figures like Khan...
"Infinite patience" is not a quality ingredient for a good education, nor is it something we should continue to extend to the education "revolutions" of Sal Khan. biblioracle.substack.com/publish/post...
For anyone who's waking up to this Palantir statement, I wrote a guide to the company and the fatuous chauvinism of its "defend the West" cosplay ideology a few weeks ago
Suffice it to say that the cultural achievements Palantir wants to define, falsely, as belonging solely to "the West"—art, science, philosophy, liberal individualism—are all things that the widespread application of Palantir's authoritarian surveillance technology will tend to diminish and destroy
Indeed. It's a model for what everyone else should be doing and yet here they want to undo it.