Well look at that. I have a new regional pun I can use :DD
(And here I was making puns about MTS yesterday that maybe one person got)
Again, not actually the primary raison dâetre of a college: rather a facet tacked on to help pay the bills. Itâs worked out pretty good in the past! But a skilled trades academy and a college come from very different places, and should continue to do so.
Paging Dr. FreudâŚ
(Quietly lowers head on to desk :D)
Maths is what we call it in English, Math is what you incorrectly say in American.
I watched this recently, no idea how accurate the dichotomy it represents is, I never even went to university, let alone university today in America. I liked his message all the same, told with style and humour.
And next youâll say colour is correct and the element is pronounced âAl-you-min-iumâ.
You are dead to me.
Okay, I just had a sit down with a math PhD, a math masters, and a hobo. We have come to the agreement that since âmathâ is an informal shortening of mathematics, it benefits from an informal transitive property of plurality.
Also, statistically how often are English words that end with âthâ not innately plural or plurality is meani gless? Yes, I can name outliers, but they donât appear to be within a standard deviation in common occurrence.
(And you know Iâm just taking the piss, right? :D)
It doesnât exist, really. Iâve not noticed this âtrendâ everyone seems to be so afraid of. Thereâs a still a large contingent of lefties that object to the institutionalization of âsafe-spaces.â Itâs not so pervasive as people make it out to be.
I do think that thereâs something naive in the idea that students should âTake Chances!â and âDonât be afraid to fail!â I think that based on the current level of competition for employment, itâs more like, âPlay it safeâ and âBe very afraid to fail.â I see no way in which challenging yourself in college will make you look better on paper to an employer. This is why the sort of idealized vision for a university of the future is one not tied to employment at all. This is why I think all university courses should be pass/fail. Grades should not matter, only whether youâve reached a level that will allow you to proceed in your education.
That, to me, sounds a lot more like ice-cold pragmatism than this idea that âgood gradesâ mean⌠well⌠anything at all. I get âgood gradesâ. They mean nothing to me. My program is relatively competitive, and I take some honors courses but I donât give two shits about my grades. I rarely look at them until I reach the end of a semester. My standards are, âAm I confident in the material?â and âAm I achieving any level of mastery here?â I had an assignment that comprised a significant portion of my grade for a class that got a 50/50. I thought it was shit, because I failed utterly and fantastically to figure out one key part that was driving me batty. I got a great grade because I wasnât expected to understand it, but that doesnât mean I was satisfied with it. But ultimately, the difference between a 97% and an 82% can come down to dumb fucking luck and desperately having to piss all through a two hour exam. Stephen Hawking was famous as a bit of a lag-behind student. You want students to take risks? Donât subject them to weird fine-grained distinctions that are strained by reality. I love advanced mathematics. I love them so much that I look forward to the end of this semester when I will never have to study them for a grade ever again. And study them Iâll have to. I have a lot of personal projects and ideas Iâd like to develop that depend on it.
This is honestly a very intellectually dense, and interesting topic. Some times âthrow away phrasesâ like Be Afraid to Fail are quite layered. One of the favorite in agile development is Fail Fast, Fail Often. Which works⌠Sometimes. But can a civil engineer or cabinet maker fail fast and often?
Also, virtually nothing other than subject mastery, academic contacts, and work ethic matter when you leave academia.
Abe, you have the absolute right mindset. And many in academia have a blind spot that you could help illuminate.
I go with Humphry Davy. Always stick with the Cornishman.
Alumium.
First day of classes has come and gone, and I was annoyed by something that I donât know how to fix.
New policy in my university as of a couple of semesters ago makes it (un)clear that itâs an expulsion-worthy offense to sell your notes to a third party service. The reason itâs unclear is that itâs vaguely connected to a rule about copyright, but in syllabi it refers to simply âclass notes.â I would think any notes I take are owned wholly and entirely by me. You cannot copyright facts, as has been decided over and over and over again across the US. So this semester my professor seemed to bring it down to a question of the individual professorâs copyright interests.
Iâm not averse to professors retaining copyright in principle. In practice however, it explains why all of the PowerPoints that used to be given out as such are now PDFs. The limitations this imposes arenât particularly onerous, but Iâm mostly concerned about how far the university is going to take this. I think Iâll lose my shit if the university forces DRM on the stuff. Iâm also still mostly in the dark about university policy here, which is the biggest sin. Can I use my notes to tutor someone else one-on-one for cash? God knows I would like to. A big part of it is that the university turned it into a student ethics issue. So it doesnât matter if I have a legal case to use my own notes for X,Y, or Z because the university can expel me with whatever passes for due process internally and thereâs probably very little I can do about it because I donât have hire-expensive-lawyer money.
Iâm already financially in the hole for the education, so I really canât afford to take a risk either way. Student ethics codes actually bother me immensely for this reason. Yes, academic dishonesty is a bad thing and measures should be taken to stop it, but ethics codes rarely stop there. Theyâre poorly worded, inconsistently enforced, and thereâs little recourse unless the university actually violates a law or a contractual obligation. I donât think that universities should have this much power over my life. As a student Iâm subject to more rules and regulation (even living off campus) than I was as a grown-ass man living and working in town just a year and a half ago. An example: I cannot bring âa weaponâ on campus. Thatâs the phrasing and wording in the student ethics handbook. By law I can carry a pocketknife anywhere in the state except a school, normally. Only firearms are legally prohibited on university property. But more importantly as far as the university is concerned, I have no idea what that means. Is a Swiss army knife a âweapon?â Is a camping knife a âweapon?â Is sixteen ounces of thermite a âweapon,â or any other hazardous substance I might produce in a lab? Itâs completely unclear, and when itâs unclear, and the institution has wide latitude, it means that the university can pick on whoever it wants. It wouldnât be a big deal if it was just a matter of not bringing it to campus, but as is the case in many a university, half the town is technically part of the campus. The penalty for a violation can amount to what is essentially a thousands of dollars in fines and the inability to get a higher education. Itâs a little insane. Not to mention the little canisters of pepper-spray I see many a lady student carrying around: Those are literally and indisputably weapons. I donât advocate that they not have them campus crime stats being what they are, but I do think that the ethics code is sufficiently clear (or vague) to ruin any such young womanâs day.
I donât know that universities should have this power. Itâs predicated on some very old ideas that we got rid of a while ago, about universities essentially acting as our parents. Beyond that, it seems to go back to chivalric orders and ideas about nobility. If we are going to talk about universities of the future, shouldnât we also talk about limiting their reach into studentsâ daily lives? If they canât tell me how to hold my fork as they once did when only the truly wealthy were using the colleges and universities, why can they tell me what I can be arrested for? What are the implications for students who engage in civil disobedience? Why are they allowed to decide if Iâm mentally healthy enough to attend class? What gives them such wide-ranging rights over me, beyond what seems like tradition?
Partly, Iâm too old for this shit. I never noticed or cared when I was in my late teens and early twenties, but as someone whoâs firmly in adulthood territory, Iâm keenly aware of the rights and privileges you surrender, and for what? At the end of the day, itâs a fairly mundane endeavor. Youâre in classes and learning things. Youâre not managing a nuclear stockpile or other peopleâs money. Fuck 'em, Iâm no gentleman and didnât come to a university to learn to be one.
So, again, the university of the future. Should it be closely linked with the job market, or should we spin off the university into something else entirely? How do we fund these and vet people coming into them? What about reviving âgreat book schoolsâ that donât just focus on the western canon? Do we go the Hampton College route (which is a pricey school)? How do we disconnect the notion that an intellectually rigorous, philosophically based education isnâtâ just a ânice to haveâ, but can be accessible to all?
Thoughts?
Well, we can start by paying for it.
Germany, Finland, Scotland, Norway, Denmark, austria, Greece, Iceland, SloveniaâŚ
theyâve all accepted the principle that undergraduate degrees do not carry fees. If they can manage it, the rest of the developed world can too. Itâs just a matter of priorities.
More generally, we need to solve the question of what universities are actually for.
Currently theyâre trying to be all things to all peoplle- theyâre expected to be:
Job training centres for law, medicine and technology
The research arm of the state
Subsidised R&D for favoured technology sectors
Training facilities for professional sports (leading to the issuing of degrees in running and jumping)
Ideological training for the next generation of the elite (see any PPE or most Economics courses)
Incubators for hermetic schools of meaningless post-evidence thought, expressed in baroque layers of complex jargon. (again, see some schools of Economics, or some other subjects that will get me into trouble here).
With all that going on, Itâs hardly surprising that people are a bit confused about the role of the University.
What I think they should be? Well, itâs getting close to idealism again, but I canât help but think they should be:
Centres for excellence in scientific research
Hubs for a process of lifelong learning
Locations for clusters of rigorous scholarship.
Of course- this would all take more detail, clarity and money than I have right now.
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