Subject: The Review: Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Eclipse of Faculty Autonomy; the CDC and Paranoia
It is too early to know what the long-term consequences of the coronavirus crisis will be for public attitudes toward expertise. While one imagines that the faster-than-expected development of vaccines will boost the prestige of pharmaceutical scientists, it is harder to predict how attitudes toward government organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might change. At the moment, trust is not especially high and it has declined over the past year.
How reputationally catastrophic, for example, will early missteps prove to be? As the newsletter
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Even smart and seemingly attentive observers frequently turn a blind eye to trends that fail to fit the narrative of the moment. This is true in politics, economics and private life; it’s also the case within higher education.
Margaret Heffernan, a business professor and television producer, and the psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald have described the biases, blind spots and other cognitive traps that lead us to ignore developments that are right in front of our eyes.
Our impaired vision, in their view, is not simply due to distraction or the confusion that comes when we are bombarded by a bewildering and overwhelming stream of information. It is also due to a lack of mindfulness, deep-seated preconceptions and prejudices, and deliberate, purposive efforts to evade unpleasant truths.
There’s an ongoing debate over whether online education is cheaper than its face-to-face counterpart.
There’s no doubt that it can be. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. All you have to do is:
Uncap course enrollment.
Substitute lower-paid graders, teaching assistants, coaches, course mentors and adjuncts for tenure-stream faculty.
You can reduce costs even further by eliminating physical classrooms, faculty offices, libraries, labs, studios, auditoriums, clubs and other student organizations, and athletics.
That’s not all. If cost cutting is your sole goal, you can:
Create standardized master classes to be “taught” by whoever is cheapest.
Adopt a self-paced, self-directed educational model to further reduce the need for instructors and support staff.