Fair Matter

Ditching Dante

By Erick Kelemen

 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

 (In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark forest,

For the straight path was lost.)

 

I’m having a terrible time re-reading Dante’s Inferno. I am in the middle of my life (knock wood) and I’ve known that lost feeling as well as anyone. So, this poem should speak to me even more than when I was younger. Years ago, when I taught it, it was among my favorites. Now, I want to consign it to the heap—not even to a purgatory for books I might one day return to.

Before, even where I did not agree with it, I could praise its artfulness and complexities. Now, I am unable to suspend my own moral code long enough to do so.

MOOC Me

by Katherine D. Harris

In January 2013, San Jose State University became widely criticized for the Provost's move to employ Udacity to teach MOOC-format for remedial math and statistics. (See “California to Give Web Courses a Big Trial," "California State U Will Experiment with Offering Credit for MOOCs," "Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online," "The MOOC Bubble: where do we go from here?")

The Provost, who is relatively new to our campus, has been moving forward with these ideas in order to reverse the deadly budget crisis that has affected our campus in particular. As one of the larger CSUs (with 30,000 students), we were being asked to take some of the largest budget cuts over the last 20 years. Those funds have never been restored, and the faculty are dwindling because of it. This latest move to employ Udacity seems to put our particular kind of students at risk – those students who crave face-to-face contact, those students who drop out at an alarming rate of 55%, those students who are often the first members in their families to attend college, those students who take six classes to avoid staying another semester.