Category: liberal arts

In my recent interview with former congressman and Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr, we talked about the right to privacy and how it might be something we are compelled to enforce on ourselves, given our current willingness to share so much ourselves, so publicily.

This blog post at the Chronicle touches on the same subject from the perspective of student life in the era of e-textbooks:

CourseSmart, which sells digital versions of textbooks by big publishers, announced on Wednesday a new tool to help professors and others measure students’ engagement with electronic course materials.

When students use print textbooks, professors can’t track their reading. But as learning shifts online, everything students do in digital spaces can be monitored, including the intimate details of their reading habits.

Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.

Even attempting to summarize my interaction with Barr on this subject, I am reminded of how problematic this subject can be. For example, how do we define, 'it,', 'we' or 'ourselves' in this context without moving to some kind of enforcement mechanism that curtails the very openness of the access represented by online tools? It's a subject that's not going away, but beware of seemingly easy fixes. Better to struggle with this intellectually and rely on critical discussions that weigh the compromises of possible solutions. In a way, this reminds me of the limits of Moore's Law (and even, to an extent, Newtonian physics itself) with the advent of the nanoscale; as we develop heightened electronic tools, their capacity will outstrip our ability to easily govern them.

Again, it takes a very comprehensive education to navigate this complex world and long exposure to a wide range of arts and sciences is the key.

That fount of conventional wisdom, National Public Radio, aired a segment this morning on pressures faced by liberal arts colleges during the current economy, though it could have run anytime in the last 25 years such did it trot out the tried-and-true elements of a good news story:

Liberal arts schools have long had a rap of being a kind of luxury, where learning is for learning's sake, and not because understanding Aristotle will come in handy on the job one day. But economic pressures and changes in the world of higher education have now put them more on the defensive than ever.

"There's been a lot of hand-wringing for a long time about the relevance of a liberal arts education, but I think those worries have heightened over the last couple years," says Bowdoin College President Barry Mills.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing, certainly, but there has been much more than that. Why do students continue to attend these elite colleges? Why do parents (and donors) continue to support them? How is it that students even at large Research-1 universities end up as history majors? Could there be some greater value to understanding Aristotle than initially assumed? Ah, the 17th paragraph, or several minutes in, if you were driving:

[Wellesley Provost Andy]Shennan says a liberal arts education that teaches kids lifelong skills of how to think and how to be adaptable in whatever job they end up doing is actually more important now than ever.

"We are not giving up in any way on the basic beliefs that we have about the long-term value of a liberal arts education," Shennan says. "But we also don't have our heads in the sand, and I think we have to continue to make the case as persuasively as we can."

Congratulations to our engineering colleagues around campus, which means faculty in many Franklin College departments including chemistry, physics and astronomy, mathematics, computer science, biology and microbiology, marine sciences, genetics, geography, art and anthropology, as well as numerous interdisciplinary research centers created thereof. This list alone explains why it was important for UGA to put together a formal engineering college, and it also shows that successive Franklin College deans have been very supportive of engineering, in word and deed, over the years. As I've written before, without a lot of fanfare Wyatt Anderson and Garnett Stokes in particular were instrumental in collaborating with the engineering leadership and the CAES on joint faculty appointments to demonstrate the viability and importance of engineering, before it was widely embraced at the University. They helped bring to UGA many talented faculty members who are now working at the leading edge of new research frontiers who would have otherwise gone elsewhere. Instead, they were able to join our faculty to help build something new.

This is an example of quiet, visionary leadership that builds capacity for providing great opportunities for students and faculty. In this case, creating the foundations for engineering in a liberal arts environment.

Image: Nano Arch, developed by researchers in the UGA Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.

Here's a great little post about Apple and Steve Jobs to start the New Year:

In June 1976, Steve Jobs went looking for someone to print the manual for the Apple I computer, the first product from the company he had started with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne a few months earlier. Jobs's friend Regis McKenna, the head of Silicon Valley's premier advertising and public relations firm, suggested he contact Mike Rose, who ran a small advertising agency in Los Altos, California.