Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an editorial questioning Rudy Giuliani’s judgment in a speech endorsing Joseph Lhota, a Republican candidate for mayor.  So far in his campaign, Mr. Lhota, has taken several fine, moderate positions.  I have  liked his comments on education and the readiness of New York City public school students to do college-level work.  However, Mr. Lhota has to rein in Rudy Giuliani, his former boss in City Hall. The editorial questions Giuliani’s judgment as follows:

“Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani went to a fund-raiser on Staten Island on Monday for Joseph Lhota, his former deputy who is running for Mr. Giuliani’s old job. Thanks to a blogging reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, there is video of Mr. Giuliani reprising his role as the Mayor of 9/11.

“What you want to do with a terrorist? You don’t want to prosecute him and put him in jail,” he said. “You want to grab him, question him, and find out who else is involved. Find out what these networks are like. That’s how we prevent further attacks. And we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. We need a mayor who can speak up for that. We need a mayor who understands that, from having been at my side virtually every day for 40 days, from the moment the bombs hit until the moment we left office. Joe wasn’t away from me for more than two minutes.”

Let’s pause on that because that is one weird quote.

Does Mr. Giuliani really think that the next mayor should be the one who’s best on terrorist interrogations? And that Mr. Lhota is fit to run the city because he was once attached to His Honor’s hip?

Apparently so.

But remember, voters, this is the mayor who put his crisis-command bunker in the previously bombed and soon-to-be-destroyed, most-famous terrorist target in America: the World Trade Center. Who made his chauffeur the police commissioner, then pushed him for homeland security secretary, until that man was exposed as a crook and liar and sent to prison. We wish we could make a magic spell to stop Mr. Giuliani from posing as a national-security expert. It would be two words: Bernie Kerik.

Then, in his speech, came the subject of crime and civil liberties, where Mr. Giuliani probably should not have gone. He said the police need to keep stopping-and-frisking because: bombers! He said Chicago has so many murders because cops are too respectful of the Constitution: “They’re very worried, very worried about rights — this right, that right, some other right. The only right they’re not thinking about is the right to be safe.”

Mr. Lhota once ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a job relevant to the one he wants but one that Mr. Giuliani did not discuss. Mr. Lhota surely appreciates the endorsement of his old boss, but he probably would prefer that it didn’t resurrect memories of boiling racial tensions, civil-rights abuses, police brutality and a cult of personality at City Hall. Mr. Giuliani did not help him.”

Good advice!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The lines are being drawn and the battle against MOOCs has begun.  I think it was George Otte who first posted in  a private blog about decisions at Duke and Amherst by faculty that was covered in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The faculty of Duke University’s undergraduate college drew a line in the sand last week on online education: Massive online experiments are fine, but there will be no credit-bearing online courses at Duke in the near future.

The university’s Arts & Sciences Council, the governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education.

2U’s defeat at Duke marked the second time in a month that undergraduate faculty members at a top liberal-arts college had struck down a proposed deal with an online-teaching consortium. On April 16, professors at Amherst College rejected an invitation to join edX, a nonprofit provider of massive open online courses.

Like the Amherst faculty, members of the faculty council at Duke passed an alternative resolution affirming that they intended to pursue online education—just not like this one, right now.”

Yesterday The Chronicle reported that “professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University are refusing to teach a philosophy course developed by edX, saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

The San Jose State professors also called out Michael Sandel, the Harvard government professor who developed the course for edX, suggesting that professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them…

…But the authors of the philosophy department letter are nonetheless worried about what could happen in the future. “Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.”

Peter J. Hadreas, chair of the philosophy department, said he believed that appealing to Mr. Sandel directly would be the best way to spark a public conversation about the possible unintended consequences of superstar professors working with edX and other MOOC providers.”

Developments at San Jose State are especially interesting given that San Jose is one of the first pubic university that has a major contract with edX for the development of MOOCs.   The salvos have been fired.

Tony

Dear  Commons Community,

The World Wide Web has just  turned 20 years old. On April 30, 1993, the Web went public for everyone to use  and two decades later CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), the organization that developed the Web, has brought the first website back to life at its original address. It is elegant in its simplicity.

Happy Birthday WWW and Thank You, CERN!

Tony