"In his history of academic freedom in America The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand writes, “Coercion is natural; freedom is artificial.” The tenure system is an elaborate construction. The hiring process is ridiculously strenuous but that’s what keeps it from being a system based on patronage. By the time you get your job and then achieve tenure—after interviewing, having many people read your work and references, giving a job talk in front of a dept., undergoing evaluations by committees and external reviewers—you feel legitimate. Even when you know chance played a big part, you nonetheless don’t feel you owe your luck to any particular person. That’s often not the case when hiring off the tenure-track. When we hire off the tenure track, we create complex networks of obligation; we create potential fiefdoms. At the very least, we make our world more vulnerable to corruption: I protect your job security, you vote for me. I give your girlfriend these adjunct sections, you feel indebted to me. Hiring on the tenure track has its opportunities for patronage, of course, but there are more steps, more bureaucracy, more people involved at every stage. As a result, the kind of direct-unmediated power of boss-employee is diffused in a way that it isn’t with off-track hiring."... read the full post.

I haven't read Lanier's latest book yet. And I'll admit, I just finished "You Are Not a Gadget" last week as part of the research for my book. I didn't like it as I found the arguments slippery and bombastic in a way that made me -- someone who, I think, is pretty sympathetic to some of Lanier's analysis -- shrug. Sirius writes in this review that "Lanier would have done better with a blast of pure pessimism or by embracing far simpler and more probable fixes. But some surprisingly knee-jerk reactionary political prejudices lead him away from the more likely solutions. The result is an often brilliant book that is subverted, in the end, by an obscure intellectual exercise." So again, I shrug and hope that the book I'm working on is mo' better.... read the full post.

"For a complex tangle of political reasons, “the people in power” are currently paying a tremendous amount of attention to issues relating to access to education, and the role of the cost of education in regulating that access. MOOCs have popularized and significantly advanced the conversation regarding both universal and free. The general public is beginning to believe that technology may have the near-term potential to provide a genuine solution to the problem of making education both universal and free. We can take advantage of the space MOOCs have created in the public conversation to introduce and advance the idea of truly open educational resources to people who are unfamiliar with it."... read the full post.

"If you and I have had a conversation about math education in the last month, it's likely I've taken you by the collar, stared straight at you, and said, "Can I tell you about the math lesson that has me most excited right now?" There was probably some spittle involved." Whether or not you adore Dan Meyer like I do, then you should probably pay attention to this. I mean, there was spittle involved, for crying out loud.... read the full post.

"Community colleges, at their audacious best, are institutional realizations of the egalitarian side of America. Their recent fate has tracked the fate of that egalitarian side."... read the full post.

"Those that make policy, headlines — those that get startup funding, run foundations, and even those that write for the major news outlets are often from the right hand side of the above graph. In particular, many come from that massive outlier in educational spending, the private research university. And this explains to me at last why I keep seeing eduprenuers talking about our out-of-control spending when the main problem has been out-of-control cuts, why I keep hearing about administrative bloat when our administrative costs have been remarkably stable. The assumption is what ails the elite university must be what is killing the less prestigious college downstream."... read the full post.

"Wikipedia has pretty much turned its back to the Web. Links to the Web from Wikipedia are relegated to footnotes, and even these are frequently wikilawyered out of the encyclopedia. Links within Wikipedia are encouraged (traffic! profit!) but used unimaginatively for random annotation. Landow’s 1987 paper on the rhetoric of arrival and departure would be revolutionary among wikipedians. I’ve been pointing for years to the fundamental rhetorical problem of wikis — that making the link target and the link label the same, as Ward’s Wiki did, moves all links to nouns and noun phrases with disastrous impact on the link structure. Wikipedia no longer uses WikiLinks, unfortunately, but almost every link remains anchored to a noun and almost no editors use links intelligently or creatively."... read the full post.

"If Apple really cares about a shortage of homegrown engineering talent, then it should pay taxes to fund the institutions that could address that problem."... read the full post.

"But it's been pretty rough for my sister. Recently she was hit in the face by a girl. It's been hard because we usually do everything together. I'm getting all the attention and scholarships and she feels left out. Right now I'm at Bill Duncan Opportunity Center, which is for students who were kicked out of school. People are teasing me and calling me a terrorist. And the school is actually quite easy. I'm not getting the challenge that I used to have. I don't have homework. There is no German class, and there is no orchestra. I probably couldn't even bring my cello because I was told the students would steal it."... read the full post.

What happens to MOOCs if higher education is free? One possibility: "MOOCS are experimental. As with the current system there is room for MOOCs to act as a means of experimenting with technology, pedagogy or curriculum. This allows universities to trial approaches and learners to trial subjects, without impacting upon the core degree. The impetus to do this may be lessened in a free HE system however."... read the full post.

"Discrepancies between white and minority teachers and between more and less experienced teachers are substantially larger. For instance, on average, black and Hispanic teachers are assigned to classes with more lower-scoring students than are white colleagues teaching in the same school and grade. The magnitude of this difference is educationally meaningful. A large portion of this gap, however, is “explained” by the fact that minority teachers tend to be assigned more poor and minority students, and these students tend to score lower than white students from higher-income families (see this paper for more on this phenomenon). Controlling for classroom composition reduces the estimated gaps to the point where they’re rather modest."... read the full post.

"It’s really the openness issue, full stop. And I suppose the reason I feel the openness issue somewhat keenly is that for me open was never about the cult of open. It was about the brilliant idea that if our institutions worked together instead of against one another we could both increase the positive social impact of our universities as well as take control of our destinies. Open was profoundly empowering."... read the full post.