The announcement by philanthropist Warren Hellman (left) that he is pledging $5 million to kick-start a new online Bay Area news service in conjunction with KQED, UC’s journalism school and possibly the New York Times has prompted a variety of responses.
Robert Gammon in The East Bay Express probably came out most strongly against the initiative, saying it represented a threat to Bay Area journalism as well as to the long-term fortunes of journalism students in the area.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given his position as an adjunct professor at the J-School, Silicon Valley new-media consultant Alan Mutter passed no comment on the development and merely reported it on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.
Susan Mernit, who is about to launch hyperlocal blog called Oakland Local, was ambivalent on her own blog, but concluded that, “As much as I worry that Hellman’s project will suck $$ from my own little project and other wonderful smaller sites I see emerging, the Hellman project feels more like a replacement for something we’ve lost — the big (bloated?) newsrooms of the corporate papers — not the local sites that are close to their community.”
All the major news media have reported the initiative whose website can be found here and its Facebook page, launched just today, has already attracted about 240, mostly encouraging, followers.
InBerkeley correspondent Mark Haas beamed in these photos of the walkouts happening today on campus.
He says a UCBPD cop estimated there were about 2,000-2,500 protesters. The demonstrations were concentrated at Sproul Plaza. “The rest of the campus looked completely normal. Students told me most classes were in session today,” Haas reports.
If you’re looking for a non-traditional and perhaps intellectually stimulating way to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, perhaps a civil engineering lecture will fit the bill?
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, will be giving what has become an annual lecture in memory of the terrorist attacks at 3:30 pm on Friday, 9/11 in 502 Davis Hall.
He’ll be discussing his controversial structural study, first made public in 2006, that concluded that if the Twin Towers had been built to standard building codes, they may not have collapsed.
As he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in a 2006 article (premium access required):
“‘From the day that I stood there and watched it collapse” on television… ‘I was thinking that this is impossible. That there’s something strange here.’”
Inside Higher Ed has a fascinating report on how Robert Reich, professor of public policy at Berkeley and a former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, found an innovative way to keep enrollment in his popular course on Wealth and Poverty up, despite the University of California’s budget cuts.
The cuts meant that Reich’s course could only have six teaching assistants, rather than his usual nine. That meant that he could only handle 300 students, instead of last year’s 440. But Reich wanted to deliver his course to as many students as possible. What to do? Reich’s answer: split the course in two. Have one course with all the support and breakout sessions enabled by TAs. Have another course that’s the Lite version, in terms of student/faculty interaction:
In one class, worth four units, students would have the traditional lectures with Reich and break-out discussion groups with TA’s. In a second class, worth only two units, students would attend the Reich lectures without the additional break-out sessions or the same level of coursework. Students in the lecture-only class will still receive exams, which will be graded by less expensive readers, but they won’t write essays graded by TA’s.
It’s clearly not ideal, but Reich’s innovative thinking is one of the small efforts that should help the university through its current budgetary woes.
Some ivy league schools, including Princeton, don’t even make the list, partly because money and prestige are not included as criteria when determining the ranking.
Rather Washington Monthly says it aims to produce a different kind of college ranking, rating colleges on their contributions to society. Questions under consideration include: Are they producing cutting-edge scientific research and PhDs? Do they steer their graduates into public-service jobs? Do they recruit economically disadvantaged students and help them graduate, or merely cater to the affluent?
Good to see that one of Berkeley’s frat houses is getting a makeover — at least on the exterior — given the state of many of the fraternity and sorority houses in Berkeley.
This one is on the corner of Piedmont Avenue (otherwise known as “Frat row“) and Channing Way.
The Berkeley Art Museum has posted a virtual tour of their planned new building by Japanese architect Toyo Ito. The proposed site is on Oxford Street, between Center and Addison. The current building on Bancroft Way does not meet seismic standards, and renovation costs would equal or exceed the cost of a new building.
The New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ourousoff, recently profiled Ito, writing:
His work can be maddeningly difficult to categorize. No two Ito buildings look exactly alike. There is no unifying aesthetic style, no manifesto to advance. You can never be sure what Mr. Ito will do next, which can be thrilling for architects but nerve-racking for clients (another reason, perhaps, that his work isn’t better known).
What his buildings do share is a distrust of simplistic formulas. His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individual and community, machine and nature, male and female, utopian fantasies and hard realities.
His ability to find such balances consistently has made him one of our great urban poets, someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society. It makes his work especially resonant today, when much of the world is drawn to one form of extremism or another.
The Metrics Gang, a group of doctoral candidates in economics at Berkeley, is establishing a reputation for combining economic concepts with real musical chops. Their latest effort, takes Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and renders it as “99 Problems, Econometrics Ain’t One”.
From Inhabitat (subtitled “Design will save the world”):
Engineering students at UC Berkeley recently showcased a slick solar race car clad in photovoltaic panels that looks for all the world like UFO hovering a few feet over the earth.
Dubbed the GoldRush, the vehicle is completely powered by the sun’s rays and is capable of hitting an impressive top speed of 50 miles per hour without using a single drop of gas.
Robert McNamara, one of the more fascinating graduates of Berkeley, and the most likely war criminal, died today, aged 93. The Guardian obituary is a great read, and also provides the essential summary:
During his lifetime he was perceived as a high-flying academic, a widely admired business executive, a ruthless killer of innocent women and children, and the man who did most to alleviate the developing world’s chronic poverty.
McNamara graduated with a degree in economics from Berkeley in 1939 1937, having chosen the university when he found out tuition was only $52 a year (some things have changed a bit). He was an architect of the massive bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. In Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary, Fog of War, he admitted to war crimes:
[The Air Force's Curtis] LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
He never said quite the same thing about the Vietnam war, although he did come to see the war as a tragic error, one for which he had enormous responsibility.
It is time for an 11th University of California campus: a cyber-campus devoted to awarding online degrees to UC-eligible students.
No budgetary alchemy will allow us to educate the state’s future university students in the same way we do now but with less money. The budget cuts caused by the state economic crisis are real and huge, leaving two choices. Educators can do less with less, or we can explore new ways of providing value to California and the nation by doing more — albeit differently — with less.
UC XI would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and “anytime” options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system. Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors and adjunct faculty.
We have the social networking technologies to support student interactions with instructors and each other. Science laboratories could be provided on weekends, at night or during summers, and not exclusively on UC campuses. The faculty can develop powerful academic controls to guarantee UC-caliber instruction and learning.
There’s an enormous premium charged at the moment for being educated in person, particularly if the buildings are covered in ivy. I don’t share the belief of some exuberant techies that all higher education will move online. But some of university education could move in the way Edley suggests. At the moment, the innovation in this area does not seem to be happening in California, still less in Berkeley. Way not become the innovators again?
The announcement by philanthropist Warren Hellman (left) that he is pledging $5 million to kick-start a new online Bay Area news service in conjunction with KQED, UC’s journalism school and possibly the New York Times has prompted a variety of responses.
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