Links for 2010-12-07

"My college is planning a major student survey for the Spring. We're drawing up questions that we think could help shape budget priorities over the next few years, assuming there's actually enough money to have some level of discretion. (That's far from certain.) We've got several of the usual questions: have they seen their academic advisor, how often do they use the library, etc. I suggested one asking whether they have internet access at home, so we could get a sense of the degree to which more open computer labs might help.

The folks putting the survey together rejected the question, on the grounds that too many of our students are homeless, and the question assumes a home. They thought it would be insensitive."

"The budget woes seem to many commentators to be an inarguable reason for "fundamental change" in education, but is money really a sufficient excuse for reorganizing and perhaps thereby weakening an effective system of higher education that has been the envy of the world? Further, do today's temporary budget problems really reflect a permanent inability to fund higher education in the future, a disinclination to educate students in the ways that have been traditional in the past or a dissatisfaction with the quality of prior education?

I think the pressures on education today are twofold: (1) demographic increases in the number of students seeking education combined with insufficient expansion of seats in classrooms to accommodate more students; and (2) opportunistic seeking of changes that will benefit the institutions' bottom lines but not students themselves."

"Most attendees knew Alda (and were considerably starstruck) from his "M*A*S*H" fame or one of the dozens of films he's been part of. But Alda also has a considerable science journalism background, which he brought to the table when he and the State University of New York at Stony Brook decided to collaborate to form the Center for Communicating Science at the institution's School of Journalism in 2009. Alda had already worked with the university at writing conferences and as a faculty member of the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in creative writing and literature. He had been imploring that institution and others to communicate science more effectively, and those conversations led to the new center."

"In an era when Glee cracks jokes about lesbian scissor fatigue, a man in a corset and eye shadow hardly merits a second glance. It's a logical gateway drug for teenagers edging their way towards iconoclasm, something they can imagine might horrify their parents even though it would likely provoke mild disquiet at best. It's a safe way of doing something dangerous."