Tell Me About the Bunnies, Simon

President Cuddle Bunny

By Finbarr Curtis

Simon Newman, the president of Mount St. Mary's University and academia's own incarnation of Martin Shkreli, recently made a public splash when the school newspaper reported on his proposed plan to improve academic retention rates by encouraging some students to drop out of college. He wanted to administer a survey, identify students with lower scores, and then dismiss these students before the University had to report its enrollment numbers. Newman's theory was that students with lower scores were more likely to eventually drop out and hurt retention rates, so he might as well get rid of them sooner rather than later.

Predictably, this plan met with opposition. While specific details are fuzzy, it appears that the program was never enacted as faculty did not produce names of students to dismiss in time for the deadline. When emails discussing the program were leaked by his critics, Newman promptly sought the resignation of the Provost and fired a couple faculty members who opposed him.

Newman was capable of outside-the-box thinking because he is no educator.  His professional biography cites his master of business administration degree from Stanford followed by an illustrious 30-year business career that started at Bain Co and and LEK Consulting.  This career appears to have taught him that human suffering is necessary "collateral damage" of profitable business practices.  Newman informed educators that their desire to educate students was a sign of weak will. As he explained, “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t.  You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads.”

Newt Gingrich Does Not Want to Party Like It's 1899

Newt Gingrich, Innovator

by Finbarr Curtis

It's not clear why Newt Gingrich hates the 1890s so much.  Maybe he's still seething over the decade's proliferation of agrarian populists and urban progressives.  Maybe he has been too busy to revise speeches he wrote in the 1990s that employed a familiar rhetorical trope of attacking policies by denouncing them as a century out of date.  Whatever the sources of Gingrich's 1890s loathing, his love letter to innovative education focuses mostly on how much the schools sucked.  As he explains:

Teachers lecture, students sit and some listen. Class happens at the same time, with the same material, and at the same pace for everyone. This is an 1890s model of education -- teaching to the "average" student, rather than the individual.  In an age when most information and knowledge is transmitted digitally and is increasingly personalized—think about how Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and Facebook work— we should be able to do much better than that.

Well, I'm thinking about Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook, and Gingrich has a point that these work nothing like education in the 1890s.  Now that I think about it, they work like no model of education anywhere at anytime because these corporations do not do the difficult work of teaching.  Some of you might object, of course, that a lot of important conversation happens in these spaces.  You could probably get pretty snarky and note that the only reason you are reading this piece right now is that you followed a facebook or twitter link posted by yours truly.  And you'd be right.  People can make all sorts of interesting uses of different media.  What Gingrich cites as worthy of emulation, however, is the most anti-intellectual quality of Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook: the apocalyptic promise of "increasingly personalized" knowledge.  While we have access to more information than in the 1890s, our social media habits sort through all this to help us live at the center of our own mediated worlds.  By using your tastes to shape what you see, networks of surveillance and distribution bring you information in familiar narratives that confirm your biases, assumptions, and prejudices.  The leviathan is you.

We Are the MOOC

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Locutus of Borg

by Finbarr Curtis

While there are lots of views about whether Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) should supplement or replace classroom instruction in higher education, at least everyone can agree that MOOCs are bad.  And I mean everyone. Every single person who has ever defended or attacked MOOCs agrees that they are bad.  We might even say that the most widely shared proposition in all of higher education would be these three words: MOOCs are bad.

The main reason we know that MOOCs are bad is that even those people who try to promote and defend them tell us that they are bad.  Take this defense of MOOCs:

Schools like MIT should not be forced to dilute the power of their brand by being forced to give their regular degree to students who simply take some of their tuition-free online courses. However, it is equally inappropriate to give no value to the online learning that occurs in a MOOC, particularly if a student can complete a high-quality, rigorous course and then prove mastery of the material on a separate, proctored, certifying exam.

In other words, schools like MIT know perfectly well that MOOCs will "dilute the power of their brand" but MOOCs are fine for less prestigious educational institutions (ie., schools that failed to develop "brands" because they were preoccupied with the work of teaching students).  But while there is unanimous agreement that MOOCs are bad, we are called to support them because they are "innovative." Take these recommendations by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:

Encourage accrediting bodies to be flexible in response to educational innovation. PCAST recommends that the Federal Government urge regional accrediting entities to be flexible in setting standards for online degrees to accommodate new pedagogical approaches and to avoid stunting the growth of a burgeoning industry.

So MOOCs should be allowed to compete.  But MOOCs cannot compete because MOOCs are bad.  Therefore, accrediting bodies need to lower the standards so that MOOCs have a chance to compete on a level playing field.  And by level playing field we mean that the MOOCs will offer bad education and we will decide that this just as good.  If this logic doesn't make sense to you, then you are one of those benighted intellects that fails to understand innovation.

I Am Applauding the President's Speech on Education Except I'm Doing the Opposite of That

by Finbarr Curtis

Recently, a spate of critiques of the President's speech last month in Buffalo on educational affordability have led off with a diplomatic effort to find common ground over the commitment to lowering college costs.

Like this statement by Rudy Fichtenbaum of the American Association of University Professors:

While we applaud the President for raising concerns over rising tuition and student debt, concerns that we share, we also believe that the President’s proposal will do little to solve the problem and will likely result in a decline in the quality of education offered to working class and middle class students, particularly students of color.

Or this post by Frank Donoghue at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

My reaction to his speech, however, was decidedly mixed. Parts of it resonated emotionally, as it contained, not surprisingly given Obama’s skill as rhetorician, several applause-worthy lines. I couldn’t help come away with the sense though, that the Obama administration doesn’t fully grasp the entire universe of higher education in the U.S., and that his punchiest solutions are ultimately unworkable.

Or another critical response from the Chronicle of Higher Ed from Biddy Martin:

I applaud President Obama for putting the importance of a college education squarely at the center of the national agenda in his speech at the University at Buffalo, and for insisting that students get the education they need regardless of economic circumstances.

I applaud these responses for their rhetorical generosity but I'm going to refrain from applauding the President's support for affordable education because then I would have to applaud for every person in America.  No one likes rising college costs.  Applauding the President's commitment to lowering educational costs is roughly equivalent to saying "I applaud President Reagan's commitment to the broad concept of peace when he named those missiles Peacekeepers."

The reason I am not applauding is that with the exception of the laudable goal of shifting assessments of educational quality away from US News-style ratings, most of the specific proposals are the kinds of things that will either increase college costs or decrease the quality of education.  Not only that, the President's call to put more work into developing measures of educational quality is obviously something that will increase costs because it will require more resources to sustain the administrative oversight that has been one of the larger contributors to rising college costs.

But others have already made this point.  The interesting question to me, then, is not so much why the proposals in the President's speech will not lower college costs but why anyone would believe that they would.  One possible answer to this lies in the President's call to "jumpstart competition between colleges."  This is curious because colleges are already pretty competitive in all sorts of ways.  Indeed, competition among colleges for what are imagined to be the most select pool of undergraduates is one significant source of the explosion of costs.

The Taco Bell Waffle Taco is Big

The Taco Bell Waffle Taco is BIG

And if you are lucky it might be near YOU.

The price is SMALL: 89 cents.

In her review, Erin Jackson laments that the waffle taco did not meet her expectations.

The worst offender? The sausage patty, which I can only assume is supposed to be pork. With its bouncy, rubbery texture, sheen of grease, and lack of any discernible animal origin (at least, from taste alone), a better descriptor would be brownmeat. The flavorless and weirdly airy eggs weren't much better. This may be the only fast food product in history that would be vastly improved by substituting the protein component for Taco Bell's seasoned ground beef.

Do you BELIEVE?