A panel discussion held at the Occupy! Gazette‘s Occupy Onward Conference, December 18, 2011, at the New School for Social Research, New York City. Transcript from Occupy! Gazette Issue 4.

David Graeber, Debt, The First 5,000 Years
Mike Konczal, The Roosevelt Institute
Brian Kalkbrenner, Occupy Student Debt
Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Moderator: Astra Taylor, Occupy! Gazette
Transcribed by Elisabeth Asher

Astra Taylor: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our hastily arranged conference. It’s really nice to see you all here.

So, debt. It’s nice to talk about this subject here at the New School, the institution responsible for my debt, the institution I have begrudged for the last decade, every month when I pay $400 in interest.

One of my favorite moments of Occupy Wall Street was the second or third night. I walked up to Zuccotti Park–it was early on, I was shocked that there were so many people there—I’m sort of walking along the corner of Broadway and Liberty, and there’s this guy, he’s playing a carnival barker, and he says, “Step right up! Write down what you owe to the bank; write down what you’re worth to the 1 percent!” He had these huge sheets of paper, and he had probably, you know, two dozen markers, and people were writing down what they owed and what type of debt. I actually walked by and went into the park and had this weird hesitation about putting that number down—because I would have to think about it. I would have to think about how much money I owed. But, as we were leaving, I went and I took the marker and I wrote it down, and it was $42,000. I felt sick to my stomach. Behind me, a girl who couldn’t have been more than 22 or 23 years old writes down $120,000 of student debt. And I thought, this is a radical moment, because we are articulating this number out loud, and we are putting it in a political context, and this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. I’ve known that something was wrong with this, people haven’t been really discussing this issue, something’s happening. More…

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I am writing this very quickly while on the side of Interstate 20. I am also struggling mightily to not use my colorful repertoire of insanely rhythmic and appropriate curse words. Thank me later.

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog entry from Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” I refuse to link. They do not deserve the traffic. Google it or take my word for it.

Schaefer Riley is responding to an earlier Chronicle article lauding the first cohort of Northwestern University’s Black Studies program. So bemused is she by the mere titles of the dissertations of these young black scholars that Schaefer Riley can barely contain her glee as she proceeds to viciously, intentionally, and deliberately insult every single one of the scholars listed and everyone within the field of black studies. You can almost hear her giggling as she writes:

“If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.”

The World Universities Forum is accepting nominations for its Higher Education Awards. These three awards — for Best Press, Best Policy, and Best Practice — recognize the most significant higher education achievements of 2012. Award recipients will be invited to attend the 2013 World Universities Forum where they will receive their awards. Awardees will also be recognized in the WUF program and other forms of publicity.

Best Press: The Best Press Award recognizes outstanding journalistic reporting in 2012 on higher education topics. Nominees may be higher education news stories from any form of media, and any media outlet, provided the intended audience of the reporting extends beyond the confines of narrow academic or policy specializations. The Award will be granted to the individual(s) instrumental to the creation of the news story.

Best Policy: The Best Policy Award recognizes the most significant higher education policies of 2012. Nominees may include innovative and/or far-reaching policies established on institutional, local, national or international levels. The Award will be granted to the individual(s), group(s), organization(s) or institution(s), etc. instrumental to the formulation of the selected policy.

Best Practice: The Best Practice Award recognizes the most significant higher education practices of 2012. Nominees may include, for example: innovative curricula, research projects, student services, etc. The Award will be granted to the individual(s), group(s), organization(s) or institution(s), etc. instrumental to the achievement of these practices.

To submit your nomination, please fill out the nomination form (note: nominations must be submitted by 30 September 2012).

For more information on Award Winners from previous years, please visit our website.

Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university’s focus on interdisciplinary education.

Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.

Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twenties. The initial investor was a Stanford alumnus.

The campus, in fact, seems designed to nurture such success. The founder of Sierra Ventures, Peter C. Wendell, has been teaching Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital part time at the business school for twenty-one years, and he invites sixteen venture capitalists to visit and work with his students. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, joins him for a third of the classes, and Raymond Nasr, a prominent communications and public-relations executive in the Valley, attends them all. Scott Cook, who co-founded Intuit, drops by to talk to Wendell’s class. After class, faculty, students, and guests often pick up lattes at Starbucks or cafeteria snacks and make their way to outdoor tables. More…

Image by Aaron Huey, the New Yorker

Stanford doesn’t want me. I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. I’m staring at a crude map of Romania on my MacBook. Twenty cities are connected in a network of straight black lines. My goal is to determine the best route from Arad to Bucharest. A handful of search algorithms with names like breadth-first, depth-first, uniform-cost, and A* can be used. Each employs a different strategy for scanning the map and considering various paths. I’ve never heard of these algorithms or considered how a computer determines a route. But I’ll learn, because despite the utter lack of qualifications I just mentioned, I’m enrolled in CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a graduate- level course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.

People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Fully two-thirds of my 160,000 classmates live outside the US. There are students in 190 countries—from India and South Korea to New Zealand and the Republic of Azerbaijan. More than 100 volunteers have signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages, including Bengali. In Iran, where YouTube is blocked, one student cloned the CS221 class website and—with the professors’ permission—began reposting the video files for 1,000 students. More…

Image via wired.com 

MIT is the most-buzzed about university on the Internet, beating out its Massachusetts neighbor Harvard for the top spot.

The Global Language Monitor‘s TrendTopper MediaBuzz rankings measure the brand equity of 210 universities and 200 colleges, using data from social media, the blogosphere, and more than 175,000 print and electronic media outlets.

It’s the first time a technological institution has come in first in the rankings, conducted every nine months. MIT propelled itself to the top through the announcement of its OpenCourseWare program, which allows students around the world to take advantage of MIT course offerings and earn certificates, free of charge.

“The higher education world is in the midst of a major upheaval that has only begun to sort itself out,” said Paul JJ Payack, Global Language Monitor president. “You can’t have an institution of MIT’s stature give away its product for free, or millions of students opting for on-line schools or educations provided by for-profit organization, and of course the globalization of higher ed and not record significant change.”

Image via Mashable.com

Frank Figliuzzi, assistant director for counterintelligence with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), sits for a photograph in front of a wall of convicted spy profiles at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 29, 2012.

Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon contacted the Central Intelligence Agency in late 2009 with an urgent question.

The school’s campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students.

Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies.

The CIA couldn’t confirm that the company wasn’t an arm of Iran’s government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.

Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry. More…

Image via Bloomberg.com

All tertiary education systems face the problem of breadth and depth. More specifically, where should they strike the balance between extending tertiary participation across more of the population in good institutions (breadth), and building the scientific firepower of a small number of outstanding research universities so that they rise in the global rankings (depth)?

Naturally everyone wants both. Equally naturally, resources are scarce and at any given time governments must determine the next investment.

Strategies vary. Nations might try to go broad and deep at the same time, like China. Or system building might alternate between a breadth phase – in which many new institutions are built and overall rates of participation are pushed sharply upwards; and a depth phase – in which priority is given to world-class science.

The dilemma is especially acute in developing countries. Resource shortages and other urgent priorities force them into an ‘either-or’ rather than a ‘both and more’ approach. More…

Image: jscreationzs

This article was originally published by the Daily Titan.

Public universities in California may have been dethroned as being cheaper than private schools for middle-income students. According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, schools like Harvard and Princeton provide a cheaper alternative to schools like San Jose State and University of California, Berkeley.

Private schools are generally even cheaper than Cal State Fullerton. To go to Harvard, it costs $4,000 for a family with an annual income of $30,000. At CSUF, it costs $16,331 for a full-time student.

According to the Bay Area News Group, a family of four making $130,000 a year would have to pay $24,000 for tuition, room, board and other expenses to send one child to a CSU. Harvard costs $36,000, but financial aid makes it the cheaper option.

Financial aid drops Harvard tuition costs down to $17,000 a year, under San Jose State’s $23,557 and even under the $19,500 it costs to go to UC Berkeley. While Princeton may be slightly more expensive ($19,830) than UC Berkeley, it is still considerably cheaper than San Jose State.

Private schools used to be considered more expensive than public, but that trend has changed for a couple of reasons. More…

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How do you measure academics’ scholarship? That’s a question that worries Timothy Gerber, professor of music at Ohio State University. “Let’s say a professor goes to Brussels to give a paper on a 15th-century composer. Wonderful! The professor now has an international reputation. How many were in the audience? Eight. No one asks about impact.”

This may sound like bliss to UK academics who have the word “impact” ringing in their ears as the country gears up for the first research excellence framework. In the highly decentralised US system, individual institutions make the majority of the decisions about what kinds of research and scholarship to value. Defining and assessing scholarship is central to the debate over criteria for academic tenure and promotion – but some believe that the criteria used too often encourage the academy to be inward-looking.

Take, for example, research conducted by Kent State University sociologist Jerry M. Lewis for his 2007 book, Sports Fan Violence in North America. His work was widely quoted in popular media outlets such as Sports Illustrated, which has a circulation of over 3 million. Yet “that would count for nothing in promotion and tenure today”, says Lewis. “Your research has to be in a refereed journal and it has to be in the right refereed journal.” More…

Image via Times Higher Education

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today. While General Electric remains an industrial giant, the U.S. Leather Company, American Cotton Oil, and others have long since disappeared into bankruptcy or consolidation. Today, the Dow Jones includes giant corporations that hadn’t even been created when Ronald Reagan first sat in the Oval Office. That transition is generally understood as the natural consequence of innovation and competition in a changing world.

Four years after Dow invented his average, a group of 14 leading research institutions created the Association of American Universities. All of them exist today. While a few have faded from prominence, most of the original members—including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and Yale—are now, as they were then, the most sought-after and well-regarded American universities.

The historic stability of higher education is remarkable. As former University of California President Clark Kerr once observed, the 85 human institutions that have survived in recognizable form for the last 500 years include the Catholic Church, a few Swiss cantons, the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and about 70 universities. The occasional small liberal arts school goes under, and many public universities are suffering budget cuts, but as a rule, colleges are forever. More…

Image via The New Republic 

Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.

Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?

Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience. More…

“Hilary, you know you shouldn’t wear high heels.”

No, I didn’t know.

“Believe it or not, we’ve been known to talk about female job candidates’ shoes in faculty meetings. You should go with practical shoes.”

Until that moment, I had thought that my nude Kate Spade pumps were practical. As anyone who has been through any sort of extensive job search knows, you have a go-to power suit. My power suit’s pants had been hemmed so they could be worn perfectly with the aforementioned accompanying power, yet now impractical, pumps.

Stunned, I stammered, “Got it, thanks,” before hanging up with my friend, a recently tenured professor in the sociology department I would be flying out to visit the next day to interview for an assistant ­professorship.

I tossed a pair of flat black boots into my suitcase — and realized that maybe this academic thing wasn’t for me.

Of course, it wasn’t the shoes themselves that sent me over the edge (though they were gorgeous). In a way, this had been a long time coming. More…

Image: Catherine Meurisse via Princeton Alumni Weekly

One of the striking features of a highly centralised system of higher education, such as that of the UK, is that the introduction of new targets and modifications to the quality assurance framework can have a dramatic impact in a very short space of time. When the National Student Survey was introduced in 2005, few colleagues imagined that, just several years down the road, finessing and managing its implementation would require the employment of an entirely new group of quality-assurance operatives. At the time, the NSS was seen by many as a relatively pointless public-relations exercise that would have only a minimal effect on academics’ lives. It is unlikely that even its advocates would have expected the NSS to acquire a life of its own and become one of the most powerful influences on the form and nature of the work done in universities.

The frenetic chain of emails crowding lecturers’ in-boxes and demanding that they hassle their students to complete the online questionnaire indicate that it is “that time of year” again. The annual ritual of imploring undergraduates to fill in the NSS is upon us, and up and down the country staff are exhorted to be on their best behaviour and to do the business. Multiple emails are also dispatched to students to inform them that their views are really very important and that, in any case, if their name is drawn they can win a “fantastic prize!”. Some universities hold special NSS weeks and devote considerable resources to publicity campaigns involving posters, postcards, plasma screens, lectures and online promotions. Sometimes it appears that universities spend as much time worrying about what students think of them as undergraduates spend worrying about grades.

A major World Bank report on China has called for universities to be given more autonomy by the state. This is key if they are to make a substantial contribution to innovation that would drive economic growth and enable China to leap the difficult hurdle from being a middle-income to a high-income country by 2030.

Innovation would be key to future growth as the rapid economic growth of the past few decades begins to slow, said the report China 2030: Building a modern, harmonious and creative high-income society, published last week.

To this end China must improve the quality of research in its universities, give institutions more autonomy and link up researchers in national and international R&D networks. More…

While arguments have raged about the hike in tuition fees, with thousands taking to the streets to protest, another key element of the coalition government’s higher education reforms will be easier for students to swallow: the promise to “radically improve” information on university courses.

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction.

But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector.

The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates’ careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 – undergraduate and postgraduate – sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college. More…

Image from “Long-term destinations of Oxford Graduates,” via University of Oxford Career Services

A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much, several speakers said here at Harvard University at a daylong conference dedicated to teaching and learning.

Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education.

In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop.

“It really requires someone to be doubly expert,” Mr. Wieman said. As sometimes happens in some disciplines and departments, a few people develop deeper knowledge of pedagogy. These doubly expert faculty members, he said, can show colleagues how to apply new approaches to teaching the discipline. More…

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Given the great importance that most governments in Europe attribute to student and academic mobility in public statements, and the 1.5 million non-Europeans now studying in the region, it is remarkable how few have comprehensive and systematic mobility policies, a just-released study for the European Commission has found.

“With few exceptions, countries vaguely endorse mobility as a desirable activity and adopt a ‘the more the merrier’ approach,” the report says.

Mapping Mobility in European Higher Education was released by the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) last week, although submitted to the European Commission last June.

It says Europe attracts far more foreign degree-seeking students than any other part of the world. Europe’s global market share has even increased in the past decade, despite growing competition worldwide. Increasingly, foreign students in Europe come from other world regions. More…

European Union Research Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has warned that she will “name and shame” member states that fail to speed up reform of research. “With Europe crying out for growth, the European Research Area can’t wait any longer,” she said.

“We can’t continue with a situation where research funding is not always allocated competitively, where positions are not always filled on merit, where researchers can’t take their grants across borders, where large parts of Europe are not even in the game, where there is a scandalous waste of female talent and where our brightest and best are leaving, never to return.”

Geoghegan-Quinn said she wanted an entirely new ERA partnership, with a stronger role for key stakeholders, and much tougher monitoring of member states’ progress. More…

Image Courtesy of Kaihsu Tai, Wikimedia Commons

Schools are on a short list of organizations that have been notoriously slow to adopt emerging tech. But within the last few years, as social media becomes more integral to students’ lives, educational institutions are finally catching on, and catching up.

When it comes to higher ed, there are not only opportunities for digital learning, but digital marketing too. Some schools have taken the reigns on both sides, with mixed results.

The infographic below takes a look at how schools have fared with social media over the last few years — what platforms are best, where they’ve succeeded, and the challenges that lay ahead. Full Graphic.