Thomas Friedman

See the interesting editorial by Thomas Friedman in today’s NY Times: “The Professors’ Big Stage.” (Those of you in my English 4 class will soon be reading Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy.)

I just spent the last two days at a great conference convened by M.I.T. and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” — a k a “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from massive open online courses?”

You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.

“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas.

Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”

O.K., not every professor will develop a global following, but the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real.

Four media critics wrote about media violence’s effects in yesterday’s New York Times:

As violence permeates what we see on movie, TV and video-game screens, critics for The Times consider the impact. A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, co-chief movie critics, explore the history and mythology of on-screen violence. The TV Watch columnist Alessandra Stanley differentiates between different types of violence on TV, while Chris Suellentrop puts video-game carnage in perspective.

Writing in the latest edition of Pacific Standard magazine, Ethan Watters, in “We Aren’t the World,” reports on recent scientific results that question psychology’s assumptions that the brain is a psychological invariant. This assumption has led over the past several decades to the belief, e.g., that testing a western college student is comparable to testing the indigenous people of Peru.

This is not only interesting because you might find this assumption rather odd, but it also addresses some of the discussions we’ve had in my English 4 class regarding Dan Ariely’s experiments with college students and Israeli professors.

As reported by Catherine Rampell in the NY Times, the answer for many jobs in many areas of the nation is that a college degree is required even if college-level skills are not:

ATLANTA —The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.

Consider the 45-person law firm of Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh here in Atlanta, a place that has seen tremendous growth in the college-educated population. Like other employers across the country, the firm hires only people with a bachelor’s degree, even for jobs that do not require college-level skills.

This prerequisite applies to everyone, including the receptionist, paralegals, administrative assistants and file clerks. Even the office “runner” — the in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents back and forth between the courthouse and the office — went to a four-year school.

“College graduates are just more career-oriented,” said Adam Slipakoff, the firm’s managing partner. “Going to college means they are making a real commitment to their futures. They’re not just looking for a paycheck.”

Economists have referred to this phenomenon as “degree inflation,” and it has been steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Across industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma — positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents, clerks and claims adjusters — are increasingly requiring one,according to Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads from more than 20,000 online sources, including major job boards and small- to midsize-employer sites.

This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent.

Read on and study hard . . .

A Tax to Pay for War

R. Russell Rumbaugh argues in yesterday’s NY Times that we should tax ourselves when we go to war.

Academic Freedom Vindicated in Brooklyn

Stanley Fish argues that a campus is the best place to hear debates on controversial topics.

Click the image or follow this link to find out.

I hope that you had a restful and interesting winter break and that if you were sick like many in the nation, your recovery was speedy.

Links to your class can be found at the top right of this page at teaching links, or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path to my Solano classes is a bit shorter, or you can follow this link to go directly to this semester.

Alex S. Jones from WHYY's Fresh Air site

Alex Jones in Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy writes that political scientist Robert Entman divides the media into four categories, traditional journalism, tabloid journalism, advocacy journalism and entertainment, and that these categories can be distinguished by the degree to which they commit to five journalistic standards:

The first four are accuracy, balance, holding government accountable, and separation of news from editorial and advertising. The fifth standard is the degree to which there is a determination to maximize profit. (43)

In addition, Jones claims that the profession of traditional journalism creates an iron core of information critical to democracy and that this FeCore has a hierarchy of  four layers: bearing witness, following up, explaining, and investigating.

Here are some examples of each:

Entertainment: Funny Cats

Advocacy Journalism: I Was a Welfare Mother

Tabloid Journalism: Vice Magazine

Traditional Journalism:

• Bearing Witness: Libya Attack Brings Challenges for U.S.
• Following Up: A U.S. Envoy Who Plunged Into Arab Life
• Explaining: Clinton Sees Link to Qaeda Offshoot in Deadly Libya Attack
• Investigating: Deadly Attack in Libya Was Major Blow to C.I.A. Efforts

Andrew Martin’s September 8  New York Times article analyzes the sad state of college debt default. In particular the University of Phoenix has contributed 35,049 students  who are in default.

Michael Roth of Wesleyan University has an answer that isn’t simple:

Higher education faces stark challenges: the ravaging of public universities’ budgets by strained state and local governments; ever rising tuition and student debt; inadequate student achievement; the corrosive impact of soaring inequality; and the neglect by some elite institutions of their core mission of teaching undergraduates.

But these problems, however urgent, should not cause us to neglect Dewey’s insight that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom. In a nation that aspires to democracy, that’s what education is primarily for: the cultivation of freedom within society. We should not think of schools as garrisons protecting us from enemies, nor as industries generating human capital. Rather, higher education’s highest purpose is to give all citizens the opportunity to find “large and human significance” in their lives and work.