miscellaneous

The Jerry Brown vs. Meg Whitman gubernatorial debate will be available for live-stream viewing on the Internet on Tuesday, Sept. 28, 6 PM at http://debate.ucdavis.edu/ and listening at http://www.capradio.org I am assuming that local public radio stations will carry it, too. The KPCC (89.3) website says the debate will be broadcast at 7 PM, so I assume it will be a recording one hour after the actual event. UPDATE: KCRW (89.9) will carry the debate live at 6 PM.

The excerpt below from Inside Higher Ed is about student complaints at Johns Hopkins concerning fees for “clickers.” Haven’t heard of clickers? Students register their satisfaction in real time with the lecture and, presumably, the professor adapts. As noted in the video that follows the excerpt, this idea is not confined to professors. First, the excerpt: Take Your Fee and Click It! September 24, 2010 Anyone who doubts that rising tuition is making students especially thrifty when it comes to the ancillary costs of going to college might consider Johns Hopkins University, where nearly 200 students are protesting a new…

UCSC students push for meatless Mondays (excerpts) By Shanna McCord, San Jose Mercury News 09/21/2010 SANTA CRUZ — UC Santa Cruz sophomore Virginia Hanrahan hasn’t had a bite of meat since she was 15. The 19-year-old from Orange County started shunning other animal food products, such as cheese, eggs, butter and honey last year in her desire to become a vegan. “I had never associated real animals with what I was eating. Like ribs, you’re actually eating someone’s ribs,” Hanrahan, an environmental studies major, said. “Once I started thinking about it, I was disgusted.” Hanrahan — who adopted the vegetarian/vegan…

A cautionary note about recent higher ed critiques and proposals for reform appears in the excerpt below from “Schoolwork,” Talk of the Town section, New Yorker, 9/27/10: …In higher education, the reform story isn’t so fully baked yet, but its main elements are emerging. The system is vast: hundreds of small liberal-arts colleges; a new and highly leveraged for-profit sector that offers degrees online; community colleges; state universities whose budgets are being cut because of the recession; and the big-name private universities, which get the most attention. You wouldn’t design a system this way—it’s filled with overlaps and competitive excess….

Unlike the previous post, this photo shows a view unlike anything you can see at the location at which it was taken. It shows the interior of a room in Hershey Hall in 1948. Hershey Hall was a women’s dorm, later converted to offices. An addition to it was recently torn down. (Photo from the UCLA digital collection.)