The Professor's Manifesto: What It Meant To Readers 最後演講 撥動眾人心弦

教授最後演講 撥動眾人心弦 WSJ

2007年09月27日15:56英 | 大 | 中 | 小

在孩提時代﹐蘭迪•鮑什(Randy Pausch)就在他臥室的牆上畫上了一個電梯門、一艘潛艇﹐還有一些數學公式。他的父母並未阻止他﹐反而鼓勵他開拓自己的創造力。

上週﹐身為卡耐基-梅隆大學(Carnegie-Mellon University)電腦科學教授的鮑什在向400名學生和同事發表演講時提到了這件事。

他說﹐如果你的孩子也像我當年那樣﹐想在臥室里塗塗畫畫的﹐就讓他們去畫吧。別擔心你的房子轉手的時候售價會受到影響。
他的演講幽默生動﹐讓我們分享了他的人生體驗﹐這也將是他的最後一次演講﹐因為他身患胰腺癌﹐估計只剩下幾個月的時間了。

此次演講結束後 ﹐他唯一的想法就是安靜地同妻子和三個年幼的孩子度過他的餘生。他根本沒有想到自己的那次演講會引發一陣旋風。演講的視頻片斷在網上播出後﹐數以千計的人 同他聯繫﹐表示他給他們的生活帶來了深刻影響。許多人被他的演講感動得熱淚盈眶﹐並表示要立刻採取行動。各地的父母都表示﹐會允許孩子盡情地在臥室牆壁上 塗鴉。

內華達州的卡羅•卡索耳(Carol Castle)在委托我轉發給鮑什的電子郵件中寫道﹕等我回到家裡﹐我會讓女兒給她房間牆壁塗上她喜歡的粉紅色﹐而不是我考慮今後能賣個好價錢的香草白。

人 們想讓鮑什知道﹐他的講話讓他們不再自怨自艾﹐幫助他們走出離婚的陰影﹐或更加重視家庭。一位女性寫道﹐鮑什的演講給了她擺脫惡習的勇氣。身患重症的病人 寫道﹐他們也會像46歲的鮑什那樣繼續生活。鮑什在演講中說﹐我就要死了﹐但我依然很開心。我將依舊開心地度過每一天﹐因為我不知道還有其他的生活方式。

南達科他州的唐•福蘭肯菲爾德(Don Frankenfeld)說﹐這次演講是他多年來度過的最難忘的時刻。許多人也都有這種感覺。

ABC News在《早安美國》節目中播出了有關鮑什的內容﹐並把他評為本週人物。其它媒體也紛紛對他進行採訪。全球有數百個博客發文將他稱為新的英雄。標題都非常煽情：“有史以來最好的演講”、“我經歷的最重要的事情”、“蘭迪•鮑什﹐值得你付出每一秒”等等。

鮑什在演講中說過﹐磚牆的存在是有道理的﹐它讓我們有機會表明我們是多麼想擁有一些東西。許多網站都登載了這樣的段落。一些網站還加入了牆的照片。同樣﹐牧師們在這個週末佈道時也在提到了他的磚牆理論。

一 些人將他的演講同盧•格里格(Lou Gehrig)的“最幸運的男人”的演講相提並論。一個15歲的女孩告訴鮑什﹐她的AP英語課堂上一直在分析格里格的演講﹐“我感覺﹐幾年後就會分析你的 演講。” 伊利諾伊州內珀維爾的Central高中演講團就計劃在參賽時讓一個學生演講鮑什的內容。

鮑什迷們不斷將他的演講發給朋友們。紐約一家投資銀行的技術部經理馬克•費弗爾(Mark Pfeifer)說﹐我是一個很憤世嫉俗的人﹐經常提醒別人不要給我發那種自我感覺良好的煽情文章。但蘭迪•鮑什的演講讓我非常感動﹐我也打算轉發給他人。

在邁阿密﹐退休人員羅納德•特拉讚菲爾德(Ronald Trazenfeld)將演講內容發給朋友們﹐建議他們不要總抱怨糟糕的服務和低劣的商品質量﹐而是應該擁抱他們所愛的人。

在 演講要結束時﹐鮑什談到在他獲得博士學位後﹐他的母親如何開著玩笑介紹他：這是我的兒子。他是一名“doctor”（博士）﹐不過不是能幫人（治病）的 doctor（醫生）。這只是句玩笑話﹐不過不少人聽到這個之後卻像加州的切瑞•戴維斯(Cheryl Davis)那樣讚美鮑什說﹕你就是能幫助人們的doctor。

在報告廳里給400人作的演講被數百萬人廣為傳頌﹐這讓鮑什感到有些手足無措。不過﹐他一如既往地保持著他的幽默感。他說﹐人們能感到自己非常了不起、對他人很有激勵作用的次數是有限的﹔看起來我還沒有達到那個上限。

卡耐基-梅隆大學計劃對鮑什予以褒獎。作為一位有藝術氣質的技術專家﹐他是學校里的一座連接藝術與科學的橋梁。校園里一棟正在建設的電腦科學樓將有一座步行天橋通往藝術樓。這座橋將被命名為蘭迪•鮑什紀念橋。

卡 耐基-梅隆大學校長傑瑞德•柯亨(Jared Cohon)在宣佈這一榮譽時幽默地說﹐根據你的演講﹐我們正考慮在橋的兩頭都砌上磚牆。他說﹕鮑什﹐將來的學生和教職員可能不認識你﹐但他們會走過這座 橋﹐看到你的名字﹐會向我們這些認識你的人問起你。我們會把一切告訴他們。

鮑什要求卡耐基-梅隆大學不要保留他最後一次演講的版權﹐而是讓它成為公共資源。而這次演講將讓他的精神遺產──還有那座步行天橋──留在這個世界上。

Jeffrey Zaslow

The Professor's Manifesto: What It Meant To Readers

2007年09月27日15:56漢 | 大 | 中 | 小

As a boy, Randy Pausch painted an elevator door, a submarine and mathematical formulas on his bedroom walls. His parents let him do it, encouraging his creativity.

Last week, Dr. Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told this story in a lecture to 400 students and colleagues.

'If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it,' he said. 'Don't worry about resale values.'

As I wrote last week, his talk was a riveting and rollicking journey through the lessons of his life. It was also his last lecture, since he has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months.

After he spoke, his only plans were to quietly spend whatever time he has left with his wife and three young children. He never imagined the whirlwind that would envelop him. As video clips of his speech spread across the Internet, thousands of people contacted him to say he had made a profound impact on their lives. Many were moved to tears by his words -- and moved to action. Parents everywhere vowed to let their kids do what they'd like on their bedroom walls.

'I am going to go right home and let my daughter paint her wall the bright pink she has been desiring instead of the 'resalable' vanilla I wanted,' Carol Castle of Spring Creek, Nev., wrote to me in an email to forward to Dr. Pausch.

People wanted Dr. Pausch to know that his talk had inspired them to quit pitying themselves, or to move on from divorces, or to pay more attention to their families. One woman wrote that his words had given her the strength to leave an abusive relationship. And terminally ill people wrote that they would try to live their lives as the 46-year-old Dr. Pausch is living his. 'I'm dying and I'm having fun,' he said in the lecture. 'And I'm going to keep having fun every day, because there's no other way to play it.'

For Don Frankenfeld of Rapid City, S.D., watching the full lecture was 'the best hour I have spent in years.' Many echoed that sentiment.

ABC News, which featured Dr. Pausch on 'Good Morning America,' named him its 'Person of the Week.' Other media descended on him. And hundreds of bloggers world-wide wrote essays celebrating him as their new hero. Their headlines were effusive: 'Best Lecture Ever,' 'The Most Important Thing I've Ever Seen,' 'Randy Pausch, Worth Every Second.'

In his lecture, Dr. Pausch had said, 'Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things.' Scores of Web sites now feature those words. Some include photos of brick walls for emphasis. Meanwhile, rabbis and ministers shared his brick-wall metaphor in sermons this past weekend.

Some compared the lecture to Lou Gehrig's 'Luckiest Man Alive' speech. A 15-year-old girl told Dr. Pausch that her AP English class had been analyzing the Gehrig speech, and 'I have a feeling that we'll be analyzing your speech for years to come.' Already, the Naperville, Ill., Central High School speech team plans to have a student deliver the Pausch speech word for word in competition.

As Dr. Pausch's fans emailed his speech to friends, some were sheepish. 'I am a deeply cynical person who reminds people frequently not to send me those sappy feel-good emails,' wrote Mark Pfeifer, a technology manager at a New York investment bank. 'Randy Pausch's lecture moved me deeply, and I intend to forward it on.'

In Miami, retiree Ronald Trazenfeld emailed the lecture to friends with a note to 'stop complaining about bad service and shoddy merchandise.' He suggested they instead hug someone they love.

Near the end of his lecture, Dr. Pausch had talked about earning his Ph.D., and how his mother would kiddingly introduce him: 'This is my son. He's a doctor, but not the kind who helps people.' It was a laugh line, but it led dozens of people to reassure Dr. Pausch: 'You ARE the kind of doctor who helps people,' wrote Cheryl Davis of Oakland, Calif.

Dr. Pausch feels overwhelmed and moved that what began in a lecture hall with 400 people is being experienced by millions. Still, he has retained his sense of humor. 'There's a limit to how many times you can read how great you are and what an inspiration you are,' he says, 'but I'm not there yet.'

Carnegie Mellon has a plan to honor Dr. Pausch. As a techie with the heart of a performer, he was a link between arts and sciences on campus. A new computer-science building is being built, and a footbridge will connect it to the arts building. The bridge will be named the Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge.

'Based on your talk, we're thinking of putting a brick wall on either end,' joked the university's president, Jared Cohon, announcing the honor. He went on to say: 'Randy, there will be generations of students and faculty who will not know you, but they will cross that bridge and see your name and they'll ask those of us who did know you. And we will tell them.'

Dr. Pausch has asked Carnegie Mellon not to copyright his last lecture, and instead to leave it in the public domain. It will remain his legacy, and his footbridge, to the world.

Jeffrey Zaslow

這所工學院是以"專案-團隊合作"為主的新工程學程
很有領先全世界工程教育新潮的勢頭 希望他們成大功

Matriculation

Re-engineering Engineering

Marc Asnin/Redux, for The New York Times

The Hands-On Approach: Building a different breed of engineer at Olin College.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: September 30, 2007

WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”

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Marc Asnin/Redux, for The New York Times

Beyond Theory: An Olin senior working as part of a consulting team asked to develop a robotic agricultural tractor.

Olin College started with what would amount to institutional suicide. Named for its founder, a munitions manufacturer who died in 1951, the F. W. Olin Foundation had spent nearly six decades giving money to dozens of campuses for buildings, much of it for teaching engineering and science. In 1993, however, the board of the foundation floated the idea of doing something that well-financed organizations rarely do: go out of business. Lawrence W. Milas, the president of the foundation, said he had grown frustrated with a process that helped schools but didn’t change engineering education, which he says he thought was in a rut. He wondered whether it might be a good idea to fold the foundation and devote its assets to the creation of a new college.

A conversation with an executive of the National Science Foundation, Joseph Bordogna, persuaded Milas that his idea was sound. As a major, engineering was slipping in popularity. And the schools and their graduates were suffering from many of the ills of higher education generally. More and more, the schools were demanding specialized courses of study instead of an interdisciplinary approach. Bordogna explained how the National Science Foundation had been lending support to schools that were trying to adopt reforms and foster an undergraduate experience that focused on learning through inquiry and discovery. Yet Milas understood that these programs were competing with a strong institutional inertia. Engineering schools had structured themselves, largely for the convenience of faculty, around a comfortable way of teaching but not the best methods of learning. There was too much note-taking in the classroom and not enough hands-on learning. Institutions stressed research over undergraduate teaching, because that’s where the recognition and grant money come from.

The Bordogna meeting got Milas thinking. “That’s when the light went on,” Milas recalled. “We can start with a blank slate.” He went back to the Olin Foundation and started to push. He recalled that the other members of his small board had reservations, but Milas was certain. “I was a little bit of a terrier on this,” he said. “We went for it.” Eventually, the F. W. Olin Foundation agreed to give more than $400 million to create a whole new school.

Milas began looking for someone to lead the school, and the president of Harvey Mudd College, in California, suggested that he take a look at Miller, at the time the dean of the college of engineering at the University of Iowa. To Miller, it was a unexpected call, and an unwelcome one. He had just turned down another job offer, “and my family was cheering.” He had a teenage daughter who was hoping to graduate from high school with her friends. But Miller also wanted to see engineering make a change for the better, and he endured years of frustration in trying to put through modest reforms in Iowa and, previously, at the University of Southern California. When the call came from Milas, Miller said, he agreed to fly down to Sarasota, Fla., to meet him in the summer of 1998, “just to have a conversation.”

The conversation went on over two days. Milas told Miller that the endowment would be large enough that the school would charge little or no tuition. “The primary job of the president wasn’t going to be out there raising money,” Miller told me. “It meant that you could spend your time doing the important work of trying to rethink engineering education.” Even more important, Milas told him that he wanted to create a nimble institution that could continually reinvent itself and honor change. “I couldn’t stop thinking about this on the way home,” he said.

Not long after, he became employee No. 1. “My wife sort of thinks of it as my midlife crisis,” he told me.

IT ISN'T EASY TO BUILD a college from scratch, although, to listen to Miller, it’s a lot of fun. Miller recruited a leadership team, and the school invited 30 students (out of more than 600 applicants) to come in 2001 for a “partner year” in which they would help develop and test the curriculum. They helped come up with Olin’s DNA: project-based learning. The first students built projects like golf-ball cannons: they worked with faculty members to master principles of physics, materials science and mathematical modeling on the fly as they planned and built machines that could shoot a golf ball 300 yards. The school officially opened in 2002; it secured agreements with Babson College next door to provide some business and humanities classes; Wellesley and Brandeis nearby also kicked in humanities courses, as well as life-science classes.

The result is a school with no academic departments or tenure, and one that emphasizes entrepreneurship and humanities as well as technical education. Its method of instruction has more in common with a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard engineering curriculum. “How can you possibly provide everything they need in their knapsack of education to sustain them in their 40-year career?” Miller asked. “I think those days are over. Learning the skill of how to learn is more important than trying to fill every possible cup of knowledge in every possible discipline.”

Though the school charges no tuition, room and board is about $12,000 a year, which is in line with the full cost of a year at some state universities. Olin has already garnered an impressive amount of attention in the college guides. A Kaplan/Newsweek “How to Get Into College” guide called Olin one of “the new Ivies.” The Princeton Review says Olin “may well be the most dynamic undergraduate institution in the country.”

And the students are good. Over lunch in the school’s sunny dining hall, one student, Andrew Coats, recalled that in the summer after his freshman year he had an internship, and “we were all given our canned engineering project” to fill up the time. The topic was new to him, he said, but he had already tackled plenty of projects and climbed steep learning curves in just one year at Olin, so he dove in. “I was able to do my summer-long project in two and a half weeks,” he told me with a smile. “Somebody who graduated from M.I.T. is probably a better formal engineer. They can probably recite better than I could. But I have other experience.”

Alison Lee, a recent graduate now in South Korea on a Fulbright scholarship, said the process of solving seemingly insurmountable problems is an Olin rite of passage, like the project that was given to her and her fellow students: build a robot that can climb a wall. When it worked, she said, “it was the moment of realization that I could do anything.” (In a field where female students are traditionally scarce, more than 40 percent of Olin’s students are women.) The problem-based process is good preparation for the real world, said another student, Meenakshi Vembusubramanian. “You’re not going to go into a job and get a thermodynamics problem set,” she said. “You’re going to have a problem that’s badly defined.”

The notion of taking part in something new is part of the draw for incoming students. Alyssa Levitz could have gone just about anywhere after high school — her grades and scores were great, and her equally accomplished sisters were accepted at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown. She had visited 15 colleges, and they were starting to blur. But Levitz, who says she is as comfortable with math and science as with historical fiction, and who plays flute, piccolo and piano, found that Olin “just stood out.” She applied, attended candidates’ weekend and says she loved the team project that required her to connect a series of foam slabs to form a kind of aqueduct. More important, she hit it off with an assistant professor of electrical engineering and music, Diana Dabby, who was studying the application of chaos theory to music. She heard a performance of the school’s conductorless orchestra. (“Not even,” goes the campus joke, “a semiconductor.”) These were engineers, yes, but the teachers and students were also artists and musicians and, it seemed, passionate about teaching and learning. It didn’t hurt that Olin charges no tuition, but that wasn’t the point. After she was accepted and feeling the rush that comes with the fat envelope, she shared the news with friends back in Iowa City. One classmate said, “I always thought you’d go someplace like Brown, one of the Ivy Leagues.” Another said: “That’s the one without accreditation, right? What would be the point in going there?”

OLIN DID RECEIVE ITS INITIAL accreditation last December, after graduating its first class. The school is already causing a stir, even beyond engineering. The Harvard Macy Institute, a program affiliated with Harvard Medical School, has developed a case study of Olin. “The issues that the Olin case portrayed were very relevant for the kind of problems we’re trying to encourage people to confront” in medicine, said Constance M. Bowe, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine and author of the study. “We need to be teaching them how to learn, as opposed to teaching them a whole lot of facts.” She sees Olin as trying “to create more of a stem cell” — the kind of cell that can become any other kind of cell.

Miller is proud of the Harvard case study, and he showed it to me in his office, a high-ceilinged room decorated with astronomy photographs and attractive stones. Through the large second-floor windows, some of the school’s 300 students could be seen below, crossing the oval formed by the handful of buildings that constitute the campus. Miller helped build the school and teaches in it as well: he created a course in leadership and ethics. He brings in whistle-blowers to talk about the pressures they are under and the importance of taking a stand. One of them was James Ashton, a former executive of General Dynamics who alerted the government to waste and fraud in the company’s submarine division. Such people, Miller said, describe the accumulation of “seemingly inconsequential decisions along the way” that lead people into ethical crises — something not all schools teach but that students entering the real world need. In traditional academia, he would not be teaching such a course. He has no advanced degrees in philosophy or ethics, only passion for the topic. But, as he put it: “The problem at Enron was probably not the lack of a Ph.D. in a discipline. It was courage.”

That message gets hammered home in the classroom, according to Benjamin Linder, an assistant professor of design and mechanical engineering. His classes have an art-school feel: students, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, shorts or pajama bottoms, are up and down and walking around the room, clustering around their projects and discussing them, cutting blue foam with a hot-wire cutter to make models. Linder told me he pushes his students not to just follow instructions. “Engineering,” he says, “has traditionally been focused on doing it right, but not on what’s the right thing to do.” That means designing products that are environmentally friendly and that respond to the needs of the people using them and not just to what the purchasing department wants. He urges his students to be more than team players. The goal, Linder said with utter earnestness, was to teach fledgling engineers “how to be bold.”

Some within the engineering profession are drawn to this side of Olin. Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, applauded the efforts of teachers like Linder to encourage questioning and pushing back. Bea, who worked on investigations into the New Orleans disaster and the loss of the Columbia, told me: “We are, as engineers, taught to be servants. We’re trained to do things, not to tell you that we can’t.” Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research at Google, wondered if the Olin program might produce precisely the kind of students Google is looking for. “I absolutely believe that teamwork and experiential learning and understanding problems and bringing multiple disciplines together to solve problems is fundamental to the way that engineers work” in the real world, he said. “The skills they are trying to develop are very meaningful in environments that we try to build.”

But not every company is Google, and Miller admitted he is concerned that few of the class of 2006 are going on to graduate study in engineering or jobs in the field. Some graduates have told him that they are not happy in their first jobs and feel like cogs in a machine. “I’m hoping to get the message to our kids that a little bit of patience and endurance could pay off in the end,” he said. Still, “this is one of the things that keeps me up now.”

In some companies, he says, the freethinking products of Olin might have trouble fitting in. “Does industry want people like that? I think that’s a very good question, but I think this goes beyond what industry wants,” he said. “This is the right thing to do — this is what industry needs. If the country had more people like this, we’d be in a much better situation.”

John Schwartz is a science reporter for The New York Times.

兒童晴雨錶調查

三分之二的德国孩子感觉不错

德國的孩子們過得怎麼樣，他們在想些什麼，有些什麼樣的願望？受州住房儲蓄銀行的委託，德國7個聯邦州的約6200名9到14歲少年兒童接受了被稱為兒童 晴雨錶的有關調查。1997年以來，該調查一直在北威州進行，今年第一次擴大到全國範圍。德國家庭部長馮德萊恩今天介紹了該調查的結果。

德國大部分孩子都對自己以及周圍的世界 感到滿意。三分之二的受調查者表示他們感覺過得不錯或者很好，當然，感覺最好是和家人或朋友在一起。所有接受調查的孩子至少每週在校參加一次體育運動，三 分之二的孩子參加了體育俱樂部。不過調查也顯示，一部分孩子經常生病或者感覺不好。

德國家庭部長馮德萊恩表示，調查的結果是積極 的，但也指出了一些問題。她說：“兒童晴雨錶調查讓孩子們能夠自己介紹情況，這一點非常棒。令人高興的是，大多數孩子在朋友圈子裏和家裏感覺很好。但有一 些孩子——比例大約是四分之一——有多重負荷，他們經常生病，營養不好，缺乏運動，覺得自己常常被人嘲笑。我們必須關心她們的問題，採取措施，讓這些孩子 也能象其他孩子一樣。”

兒童晴雨錶調查顯示，對於五分之一的德國孩子， 速食是他們飲食的固定組成部分。6%的受調查者表示從未和父母一起進過餐。而三個德國少年兒童中就有一個體重超重，在德國家庭部長馮德萊恩看來是一個值得 警惕的信號。根據該項調查，來自教育程度低的社會階層的孩子最受歧視，感覺也最不好。這些孩子往往來自移民家庭。馮德萊恩說，必須認真對待這個問題，關心 這些孩子的需要和他們的恐懼。

“這些孩子明確表示首先希望保護他們不遭受暴 力。家庭暴力是一個非常重要的話題，他們需要體育鍛煉，需要足夠的營養和教育。這是一個非常重要的領域，我們要擴大兒童看護體系，和家長們合作，我們應當 看看如何能促進兒童的健康。為此，我們成立了專家委員會，他們將在明年年底之前拿出方案。”

由馮德萊恩任命的專家委員會將在2008年底前 制定出兒童和青少年健康福利新戰略。相關的政策必須適合兒童和青少年的情況和需要。而其中最重要的一項任務是促使不同的機構，比如學校，醫療和青少年援助 機構更加緊密地合作。馮德萊恩部長認為擴大兒童看護體系是一個重要的步驟，這樣才能將覆蓋面擴大。德國兒童保護聯合會負責人洪卡甯-朔博特認為，保護兒童 的權利是關鍵。她說：“我們的最高要求是把兒童權利寫在它應該寫的地方，也就是寫進憲法。”

德國兒童保護聯合會認為，象兒童晴雨錶這樣的調查能夠讓孩子們自己發表看法，這為正確瞭解孩子們的需求和願望提供了重要基礎，也為向社會和政界提出相應要求提供了基礎。

“我們必須保證通過有力的資料科學反映出孩子們的狀況以及他們的權利和需求，這樣我們才知道應該提些什麼樣的要求。孩子們的參與，對他們進行調查非常重要。這對孩子本身也有著重要的意義，因為它表明，他們不僅今後很重要，現在也很重要。”

to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions

Columbia Still Reeling Over Visit

哥倫比亞周一"邀"伊朗總統演講 不過事前給他一頓小排頭--各自表示
大家議論紛紛

By KAREN W. ARENSON

Published: September 26, 2007

Before Iran’s president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty “to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions.” Yesterday, many critics questioned whether Mr. Bollinger had met that test himself.

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Iran’s Media Assail President’s Treatment (September 26, 2007)

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On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Mr. Bollinger’s pointed introduction of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a man who exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” and whose denial of the Holocaust was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

Some said Mr. Bollinger’s remarks were just the rebuke that Mr. Ahmadinejad deserved. Others said they were embarrassing and offensive. And there were still questions about whether Mr. Ahmadinejad should have been afforded a public platform at a prestigious university at all.

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia, said, “The tone from the host of an event was uncivil and uncalled for.

“The president of the university had every right to state his differences,” he said. “That was more than acceptable. But I believe it was embarrassing to the university, frankly, that they should decide to invite him and then treat him in this manner.”

But Emily Steinberger, a sophomore who is a spokeswoman for LionPAC, a pro-Israel group at Columbia that had vehemently opposed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s invitation, applauded Mr. Bollinger.

“President Bollinger was caustic in his criticism of Ahmadinejad, but anything else would have been inappropriate and troubling,” said Ms. Steinberger, of Teaneck, N.J. “Bollinger repeatedly said that his invitation in no way represented a condoning of Ahmadinejad’s worldviews and policies, and yesterday he proved that.”

Columbia’s provost, Alan Brinkley, said the controversy “was of a magnitude we hadn’t seen before.”

“This really was the biggest event I’ve seen since I’ve started as provost,” said Dr. Brinkley, who called it too early to judge the fallout for Columbia.

A university spokesman, David M. Stone, said that Mr. Bollinger, a legal scholar whose specialty is freedom of speech and freedom of the press, was not available to comment yesterday because he had a tight schedule.

A number of Iranian-born scholars — experts about the Middle East who now live in the United States — said they were shocked by Mr. Bollinger.

“If I as a faculty member had done this in front of my president, I would been out the next day,” said Ali Akbar Mahdi, a professor of sociology at Ohio Wesleyan University. Dr. Mahdai, who is a critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s, added, “I was taken aback.”

So was Hamid Zangeneh, a professor of economics at Widener University in Pennsylvania and editor of The Journal of Iranian Research and Analysis. “I was disgusted by the uncivilized behavior by President Bollinger,” he said. “I don’t think it is becoming for the president of a university to engage in such behavior. It wasn’t academic. It wasn’t common sense.

“Instead of behaving like a scholar, a president,” he said, “he behaved like a hooligan.”

Some Jewish groups that were among the most vocal critics of the Ahmadinejad invitation applauded Mr. Bollinger, but remained critical of giving the Iranian president a stage.

“He definitely came out swinging, with the whole world watching,” said Elliot Mathias, director of Hasbara Fellowships, a pro-Israel organization, said of Mr. Bollinger.

“I was glad to hear how strongly he condemned him,” he added. “But I don’t think it makes up for the invitation. With someone who denies the Holocaust, who wants to destroy Israel and to turn the Western world into an Islamic caliphate, there is not room to have discussion. It is like discussing with the Ku Klux Klan whether blacks are inferior.”

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Mr. Bollinger’s speech was counterproductive.

“If you invite someone, you have to be polite,” he said. “Ahmadinejad scored points, especially in their culture. If you permit an enemy to come into your home, you still treat him with dignity and respect. Therefore, we lost. The points that President Bollinger made were fine. But to close with insulting words almost undid everything he said before. It was not a good teaching experience.”

Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor who was a consultant to the Coalition Provisional Authority set up in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, said he did not consider Mr. Bollinger’s performance to be rude.

“There are some issues where it is appropriate to be delicate and careful, and to use exaggerated politeness,” he said. “But there are some issues of such grave importance that being too polite to your guest is actually a betrayal of your beliefs. For Lee Bollinger, the Holocaust is one. I applaud him for that.”

Gary G. Sick, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, said he would be surprised if there were “any long-term price” for Mr. Bollinger’s remarks.

“A lot of people will be pleased that he came out swinging, that he was willing to tell like it is, to be tough,” he said. “I bet right now that his in-box has a lot more congratulatory cables than negative ones.”

德育重榜樣

とくいく _{0 2} 【徳育】

道徳意識を養うための教育。道徳教育。体育・知育と並び教育の重要な一側面をなす。

Children need moral examples, not textbooks

09/22/2007

Here's a nightmare scenario I was beginning to picture about the near future: Whenever a felon has been arrested for some atrocious crime, everyone wants to know his or her childhood background, as well as how he or she scored in tokuiku (moral education or ethics) tests at school. And when enough evidence has been compiled to substantiate the argument that youngsters who do poorly in tokuiku tests are likely to commit atrocious crimes as adults, schools around Japan begin to supply lists of such students to police.

Thankfully, such a nightmare may not become reality. The Central Council for Education, which is exploring ways to revamp educational guidelines, has reportedly decided to forgo making tokuiku a teaching subject. This means that the Education Rebuilding Council, established by outgoing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is not going to have its way.

In defining the word toku (virtue德), the "Kojien" Japanese dictionary cites a passage from the 14th century classic "Tsurezuregusa" (Essays in Idleless) by the monk Yoshida Kenko. To paraphrase, Yoshida taught that anyone who delights in offending someone is "not virtuous." He argued that such an attitude is an unwelcome byproduct of an excessive fighting spirit.

Abe went on a crusade against what he called the postwar regime. He colored his policy with reactionary ideology, and this was especially the case with his pet policy of education reform. In his excessive zeal, however, he obviously overlooked the need to proceed carefully.

The fall foliage season is around the corner, and the leaves will soon start blazing with color. But the "Abe color" is being washed out of Liberal Democratic Party policies this fall.

The development of one's sense of public spirit and personal dignity is a lifelong process. But during the crucial formative years of childhood, we all need our parents and teachers to set examples befitting our levels of development and advise us on how to become independent individuals. Children definitely need close, personalized interaction with caring adults.

It would be a terrible mistake to think that standardized, government-approved textbooks can teach morality to children. I also disagree strongly with evaluating all children by just one yardstick.

If a child is to be likened to a tree, I believe ethics is ultimately what contributes to build the trunk. And if the trunk is healthy, it will sprout healthy branches--meaning that the child will be receptive to lessons in such subjects as Japanese and arithmetic.

The more precious the tree, the more careful we must be to refrain from hasty evaluation or overfeeding with some unnecessary fertilizer. I would certainly like the nation's young trees to grow tall and straightforward regardless of test scores.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 21(IHT/Asahi: September 22,2007)

Some of MIT's Arithmetic Hasn't Been Adding Up

Wikipedia article "SAT". 曾稱作學術能力測驗Scholastic Aptitude Test和學術評估測試Scholastic Assessment Test，簡寫為SAT。SAT測驗是由美國大學委員會(The College Board，大約4,300所美國大學共同組成的文教組織)委託教育測驗服務社(Educational Testing Service，簡稱ETS)定期舉辦的世界性測驗，做為美國各大學申請入學的重要參考條件之一。SAT測驗分為SAT理解測驗(SAT Reasoning Test或簡稱SAT I)和SAT學科測驗(SAT Subject Test或簡稱SAT II)。最近包括英國在內的許多其他國家的大學也開始承認這項考試。 功能 與其他國家教育系統不同，美國的不同學校的教學方法和課程都有很大的分別，不論是同一州或不同州的高中都會有所差異(見美國教育)，這個差別主要源於美國的聯邦制，它容許地方自主決定學校制度，而美國的稅務制度下，學校的財政都是由地方政府提供的，因此一個富裕的地方政府就能夠提供更多的資源給他們的學校。 這個制度使各大學在不同州難以比較學生的能力，在缺乏如英國的A-level一般中央統籌的中學畢業試制度下，美國教育制度需要一個類似的評審機制，於是美國的大學就開始用SAT或ACT這類的標準測驗來考核學生的基本能力,每間大學都有他們自己的考核重點，例如還有考量學校排名百分比(class rank)或是學業成績平均點數(Grade Point Average)。 這個考試通常都是由一些希望繼續學業的中學學生或畢業生去報考的，考試的結果會提供給各學生指定的院校，即使獲取入學的考量可能還包含在校成績、老 師的評語、或參與的課外活動，很多院校仍會將SAT分數視為首要粗略篩選的方法。此外，SAT的分數有時候也會成為奬學金的篩選標準。 Sat Scores of freshmen at various Colleges (2001-2002)

Given the data below for the SAT scores of the middle 50% of the entering freshman class, determine the SAT scores for the middle 90% for any two schools (assuming a normal distribution):

School	SAT
William & Mary	1230 - 1410
Virginia Tech	1080 - 1270
University of Virginia	1200 -1410
Florida State University	1060 - 1260
Wake Forest	1220 - 1380
University of North Carolina	1130 - 1340
Duke University	1300 - 1500
Harvard University	1410 - 1580
M.I.T.	1410 - 1560
California Institute of Technology	1450 - 1580
Princeton University	1350 - 1540
James Madison University	1090 - 1250
George Mason University	970 - 1180

Some of MIT's Arithmetic Hasn't Been Adding Up

By Keith J. Winstein

Word Count: 378

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped invent radar, high-definition television, computer memory and the Black-Scholes model for pricing stock options. Its faculty and staff include 20 MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" recipients.

But for some time, MIT now says, it wasn't properly calculating the average SAT scores of its freshmen.

Those scores are closely scrutinized as a barometer of college quality. They are part of the formula used by U.S. News & World Report's influential ...這是權威的美國大學評比周刊之專刊

美國大學校長需要新的經營素養

美國大學校長需要新的經營素養

---

April 19, 1995

Class Notes; With academia changing, colleges see advantages in nontraditional chiefs.

By PETER APPLEBOME

There is Douglas J. Bennet Jr., best known for running National Public Radio from 1983 to 1993, who was named president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut this month. There is M. Peter McPherson, a former banker and lawyer who in October 1993 became president of Michigan State University. There is David L. Boren, who last year left the United States Senate to become president of the University of Oklahoma.

It's not that corporate tycoons and professional managers are displacing classicists and zoologists en masse as university presidents. But increasingly, as the demands on university presidents center on raising money, restructuring and political savvy rather than traditional academic pursuits, universities are considering less traditional candidates for the pressure-cooker job of university president.

"As issues of finance loom larger, as they become questions of survival for many institutions, I think you're going to see more and more of it," said Benno Schmidt, who went in the opposite direction, leaving the presidency of Yale in 1992 after a tenure marked by financial stress to become president of the Edison Group, the venture into for-profit schools by Christopher Whittle, the news media entrepreneur.

About 1 in 10 college presidents comes from a nontraditional background, and one is Arthur Taylor, the former president of CBS, founder of what is now the Arts and Entertainment Channel, and the former head of his own investment firm. He has been president of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., since August 1992.

"Dr. Deming used to say that in academic pursuits the most important thing was to get the speed, the r.p.m.'s, of the institution moving at a much more rapid rate," Mr. Taylor said, referring to his longtime friend, the late management theorist W. Edwards Deming. "Most places literally ground down to the pace of a turtle, and that's what I found here. Now, we may not be going at the speed of a Ferrari, but at least we're going at the safe speed of a Camaro."

Mr. Taylor, 59, came to Muhlenberg after seven years at Fordham University, where he was dean of the graduate school of business, which gave him some academic experience but not the customary career path of professor to dean to provost or vice president to president. His experience at Muhlenberg is a good example of the promise and potential pitfalls of taking a nontraditional background to academia.

Muhlenberg, founded in 1848, has been one of dozens of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast that find themselves scrambling to compete for a smaller, more cost-conscious pool of applicants. Mr. Taylor was not the first to bring a sense of urgency. His predecessor, Jonathan Messerli, embarked on an ambitious building campaign and talked repeatedly of lifting Muhlenberg into the ranks of the nation's top 50 private liberal arts colleges.

Almost everyone agrees that Mr. Taylor has been a jolt of adrenaline -- too much of a hands-on micromanager for some faculty members -- who has cleaned house in some administrative areas, pushed the college toward more aggressive job counseling and placement, helped tie faculty pay to teaching and preached a more aggressive market-oriented gospel of catering to student needs.

"When I got here," he said, "I was alarmed at how slowly Muhlenberg was moving and how much it had to move out of its niche. Colleges like Muhlenberg have to make sure they don't run out of time."

Mr. Taylor's style is a little abrasive for some at Muhlenberg, but most faculty members give him high marks. The number of students applying in the past two years was the second and third largest in the university's history; SAT scores are up; the budget is balanced, and deferred maintenance costs -- the bane of many aging campuses -- are almost nil.

Mr. Taylor does not get all the credit, but many at Muhlenberg say he deserves a chunk of it.

"I've been here under three Presidents," said James Bloom, who teaches English and American studies, "and he's the most dynamic and aware of the problems in higher education by far. Coming from a corporate background probably helped him break out of an ivory tower parochialism, and in the past this has been a pretty parochial place."

Still, Mr. Taylor would be the first to say that success in business does not insure success in academia. He noted that much of his background came in "creative" businesses more compatible with academia than industry.

"To succeed," he said, "you have to be sensitive to the academic culture, which is similar to the culture of the creative businesses but is not similar to the assembly line."

And the management style of business can be a disaster in a university setting. Thus, for example, David T. McLaughlin had a strong Dartmouth College background plus experience as chairman of the Toro Corporation when he became Dartmouth's president in 1981. But despite achievements that included doubling the college's endowment, he left in 1986 after running afoul of faculty members who complained that he ran the college like a corporation.

Indeed, Dr. Schmidt, the former Yale leader, says the bottom line may be that while academia often does not provide the business background needed to run a university, business often does not provide the skills needed to deal with a university faculty and issues like academic freedom.

"The problem," said Dr. Schmidt, who had his share of run-ins with the faculty at Yale, "is there are very, very few jobs that involve the range of problems and responsibilities a university president faces. There can be grave limitations in a purely academic background, but the truth is almost any background you could think of is inadequate."

合作學習 (1998蔡士魁); 降低心臟繞道手術死亡率

合作學習 (1998蔡士魁); 降低心臟繞道手術死亡率

大學進入/畢業率統計值(OECD)

近十年英國外籍學生(中國等)倍增
富國俱樂部(OECD)的大學進入/畢業率統計值

Top of the class

Sep 18th 2007
From Economist.com

MORE people are getting degrees than ever before. From 1995-2005 the graduation rate in rich countries increased by 12%, according to the OECD's “Education at a Glance” report, published on Tuesday September 18th. Australians are the keenest students, with over 80% of young people entering university in 2005. Australia also had a high graduation rate. Around three-quarters of young people in Nordic countries and Poland attend university, much higher than Germany or Austria. This may be because many degrees in the latter countries drag on for five or six years.

AFP

Children's University 德國夏季兒童科學營

德國夏季兒童科學營

Science | 03.09.2007

Kids Spellbound by University Science Lectures

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The children are eager to answer questions

Thousands of children in Germany have been flocking to university science lectures during their summer holidays, and it's not because they're budding Einsteins.

The Children's University, which originated in 2002 at the University of Tübingen, is designed to get young people interested in science.

The idea has spread like wildfire and now more than 75 institutions across Germany, as well as others in Europe, have implemented their own lecture series for kids. Karlsruhe University -- one of only three elite universities in Germany -- has been holding a Children's University every summer for the past five years.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The interactive experiments proved to be a favorite

"It's a good way to introduce children of that age to science and research," explained organizer Margarete Lehne over the din of 300 children who were anxiously waiting for the start of a science lecture.

"They're naturally very curious and so we want encourage them to use this natural curiosity to find out how things work."

Complicated science

As a gong sounded at the front of the lecture theater, the children gradually hushed to listen to Professor Norbert Willenbacher, the head of Karlsruhe University's mechanics department. Willenbacher's area of speciality is "rheology" -- the deformation and flow of matter under the influence of applied stress. It's a complicated subject to teach to young children.

"You have to avoid using scientific terms, and you have to talk a language which kids can understand," Willenbacher said. Luckily, he has four children at home to keep him in line when it comes to explaining science.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Teaching kids about science is important to Willenbacher

"They're always telling me: 'Be short, be precise, and don't make it too complicated.' That's what I hear all the time when I talk to them about my work and my research," Willenbacher said with a smile.

Hands-on activities

Willenbacher packs many experiments into his 45-minute talk. He shows that liquids can have different viscosity by dropping eggs into beakers of water and oil and getting children to measure the rate of fall. He gets kids to bang on sauce bottles to explain that even though tomato sauce is a fluid, it only acts like one if force is applied.

Best of all, dozens of children get to run across a bath filled with rice starch mixed to a pudding-like consistency. When the children run fast, they stay on the surface. When they go slowly, they sink into the oozing mass. This demonstrates that plastic solids can have the properties of liquids under a heavy load.

Willenbacher said it was lots of extra work to make his lecture kid-friendly, but it was worth it.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Children's University proves science can be fun

"I think it's really part of scientists' job," he said. "I am dedicated to science and I have fun with science, and I want to show this to the children."

Popular program

More than 5,000 children between the ages of five and 12 regularly come to the Children's University in Karlsruhe, attending lectures on subjects ranging from electrical engineering to biology, meteorology, and architecture.

Eleven-year old Theresa has been to all of the lectures offered at there this summer. She thought Willenbacher's lecture was "fantastic."

"The best thing about it was the experiments because they were fun," she said. "At school you always have to be careful, and information is just fed to you -- they just tell you stuff. But here they also did experiments."

According to the organizers, the only real complaints about the Children's University come from the adults who are miffed about having to wait outside. No parents are allowed in the lecture room -- It's strictly a kids-only event!

Kate Hairsine

教育部變成差勁警察局

教育部變成警察局

影印原文書 恐被記過

【高 琇芬╱台北報導】原文教科書一本要價上千元，不少大學生買不下手，常有人選擇影印本。

因今年美國施加更大壓力，教育部積極推動校園保護智慧財產權，上月制 訂「遏止校園非法影印具體措施建議方案」給各大學參考，建議各校將嚴重觸犯智財權行為列入學生獎懲規範，影印原文書情節嚴重、屢勸不聽者可能被記過。

「學術用途不應干涉」
教育部高教司長何卓飛昨說，基於大學自治精神，由各校自行決定是否將影印原文書列入獎懲規範；方案另建議各校成立專責單位，集體訂購書籍以降低書價，成立 二手書平台，並聘請專家學者成立智財權諮詢窗口，須與校內影印店簽訂「不得影響智財權」約定，張貼遵守智財權標語。教育部會將各校遏止非法影印成效，列為 大學校務評鑑及私校獎補助經費分配參考。

元智大學校長彭宗平說，學校須讓學生了解「知識有價」概念，但他認為應以柔性勸導為主，不贊成將侵權行為納入獎懲規範。政治大學社會所學生林柏儀說，有些原文期刊或絕版書買不到，影印是學術用途並非營利，不應以智財權干涉。

文化大學大傳系副教授賴祥蔚建議，教師可先消化原文書，自製教學講義或上網分享，學生就不用花大錢買整本原文書；他也不贊同將侵權行為納入獎懲規範，因《著作權法》既已明定，如獎懲規範等學則，位階低於法律，無須一罪兩罰。

Essay

Revisiting the Canon Wars

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: September 16, 2007

Twenty years ago, when Reagan and Gorbachev were negotiating the end of the cold war and college cost far less than it does today, a book arrived like a shot across the bow of academia: “The Closing of the American Mind,” by Allan Bloom, a larger-than-life political philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” it spent more than a year on the best-seller list, and today there are more than 1.2 million copies in print. Saul Bellow, who had urged his brilliant and highly idiosyncratic friend to write the book in the first place, wrote the introduction. (Bellow later cast Bloom as the main character in “Ravelstein.”)

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William E. Sauro/The New York Times

Allan Bloom, the author of “The Closing of the American Mind,” a vigorous defense of the Western literary canon.

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Reading List: Books on the Canon Wars (September 16, 2007)

Review: 'The Closing of the American Mind,' by Allan Bloom (April 5, 1987)

Bloom’s book was full of bold claims: that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the “relativism” that had replaced it had “extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life”; that rock music “ruins the imagination of young people”; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers. For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the ’60s, when universities took on “the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war,” he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change “possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.”

“The Closing of the American Mind” hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities. In early 1988, students at Stanford held a rally with Jesse Jackson, where they shouted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go,” to protest a required Western civilization course. (The faculty quickly voted to replace it with a requirement including more works by women and minorities.) Bloom’s book shared space at the top of the best-seller list with E. D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” (1987), which argued that progressive education had left Americans without a grasp of basic knowledge. It also inspired further conservative attacks against the university, including Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals” (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” (1991).

Although it had great popular appeal, “The Closing of the American Mind” did not go over well among academics. Bloom’s detractors criticized everything from his interpretation of the Greeks to his views on youth culture and feminism, which he saw as corrosive influences. “The amazing thing about Allan Bloom’s book was not just its prodigious commercial success ... but the depth of the hostility and even hatred that it inspired among a large number of professors,” John Searle, the Berkeley philosophy professor and former proponent of the ’60s radical Free Speech Movement wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1990. Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.

Debates over what an educated person should know go back to the 19th century in America, when teaching any literature beyond the Greek and Roman classics was still controversial. But today, there’s widespread concern that the humanities are losing ground — as well as intellectual cachet, students and financing — to the hard sciences on the one hand and business on the other. A 2006 report [PDF] on higher education commissioned by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, which raised hackles with its proposal to introduce No Child Left Behind-style standards testing in universities, hardly mentioned the humanities. At the same time, several state legislatures have debated an “academic bill of rights” that would provide a grievance procedure against “political discrimination” on campus — a measure proposed by David Horowitz, a Marxist-turned-conservative critical of what he sees as academia’s left-wing bias.

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” Nussbaum, who panned Bloom’s book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, “the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration,” Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut.” Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard’s curriculum reform committee, concurs: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.”

But when college costs run as high as $50,000 a year, it’s harder to ignore questions like “What will this major do for my career prospects?” While humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place), the high cost of college today exacerbates a utilitarian strain that’s always made it hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America. According to the Department of Education, in the 2003-4 school year, only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates majored in English and 1.3 percent in history, compared with 20 percent in business, 16 percent in health, 9 percent in education and 6 percent in computer science.

Not all academics object to raising market questions. For Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College and the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, “the introduction of economic criteria into the university is a good thing.” During the canon wars of the late ’80s, he said, scholars had an “imperious” idea that “if we want to argue about the curriculum we’re free to do that.” But now, most realize “we have obligations to the students and the parents and the taxpayers.”

According to Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University and an occasional New York Times columnist, the conservative critique of academia connects to an economic one. “The message the neoconservatives were putting out, that universities are hotbeds of atheism, sexual promiscuity, corrosive relativism and a host of suspect philosophies being imported from France and Germany, actually took quite strongly with the intended audience,” said Fish, who was embroiled in these debates as chairman of Duke’s theory-oriented English department from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. “It’s easier for a state legislature to cut university funding when there is an unflattering view” of academia, he said.

But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.

The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity” — ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. The most-assigned living authors were Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. (Roth himself may not be so pleased with the company. His forthcoming “Exit Ghost” includes a character’s rant about a library display: “They had Gertrude Stein in the exhibit but not Ernest Hemingway. They had Edna St. Vincent Millay but not William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens or Robert Lowell,” the character says. “Just nonsense. It started in the colleges and now it’s everywhere. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, but not Faulkner.”)

But many scholars see these changes as part of a necessary evolution. To Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” (2006), the changes have been particularly beneficial in American literature, which has seen the most canon revision in part because it never had a very stable canon to begin with. “The old guard had very little to offer in the way of serious intellectual argument against the reading and teaching of ... Olaudah Equiano or Djuna Barnes or Zora Neale Hurston, so the canon of the past two or three centuries got itself revised in fairly short order,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Only the Department of Surly Curmudgeons still disputes that we’re dealing with a usefully expanded field.”

Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped. One can debate the changing fortunes of writers on the literary stock market, but it’s clear that today the emphasis is on the recent past — at the expense, some argue, of historical perspective. As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

For John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993), “The major fact that the discipline is confronting today is global English, which is a cultural corollary of economic globalization.” At the same time, postcolonial Anglophone culture is only half a century old. “I’m often impressed by this scholarship, but I’m also concerned that this new field seems to be so disconnected from the history of literature and scholarship that goes before it,” Guillory said. “I see too many scholars in the field who know very little about anything before the 20th century, and that concerns me.”

Elaine Showalter, a feminist literary scholar and a former president of the Modern Language Association, who retired from Princeton in 2003, today urges a reconsideration of some of the changes made in past decades. “This period of discovery and recovery (for example, of women writers) has been stimulating, exciting and renewing,” Showalter wrote in an e-mail message. “But now it’s time for a period of evaluation and consolidation.”

To some, another question is how to get students to read critically in the first place. “What does it profit progressives to get minority writers like Walker and Black Elk into the syllabus if many students need the Cliffs Notes to gain an articulate grasp of either?” asked Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has written on the canon wars.

The historian Tony Judt, a self-described “old leftist” and the director of the Remarque Institute at N.Y.U., which examines Europe and European-American relations, said undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s.

Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”

Some say this kind of identity-based thinking is at odds with the true purpose of education — something canon traditionalists can misunderstand as badly as their multiculturalist opponents. “What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy and religion who just left the University of Chicago for Columbia. “That’s where the conservatives went wrong. The case for the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West.” Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is “the most alienating experience possible,” he continued. “When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.”

Bloom believed education should be transformative — that it should remove students from the confines of their own backgrounds to engage with books that open up new realms of meaning. “He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents,” Bellow wrote of Ravelstein/Bloom in his novel. “He was going to direct them to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality — anything but the arid kind.” In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Bloom himself wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with “four years of freedom” — “a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” Whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question. From Bloom’s perspective, “the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.”

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

Low Technologies, High Aims

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

A welding class was part of a workshop seeking simple solutions to real-world problems.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: September 11, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.

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In the Magazine: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention (November 30, 2003)

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The Small Idea
In coming months Andrew C. Revkin will check in on the design projects initiated during the MIT workshop to see which survive field tests or get sent back to the drawing board.

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Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Alistair Cook of Scotland dealing with the aftermath of a storm on a greenhouse, one of several prototypes developed at the International Development Design Summit at M.I.T.

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Andrew C. Revkin/The New York Times

Mohamed Mashaal, right, a British engineer, testing a plastic backpack with his design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who hopes people in Tanzania can use it to haul water over long distances.

M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less and who often die young.

This summer, it played host to a four-week International Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work in the real world.

Mohamed Mashaal, a young British engineer headed for a job with BP on the North Sea this fall, poured water into a handcrafted plastic backpack worn by a design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who teaches bicycle repair in rural Tanzania and hopes to offer women there an easier way to tote the precious liquid for long distances.

Sham Tembo, an electrical engineer from Zambia, and Jessica Vechakul, an engineering graduate student at M.I.T., slowly added a cow manure puree to a five-gallon bucket holding charcoal made from corncobs. In the right configuration, the mix might generate enough electricity to charge a cellphone battery or a small flashlight for a year or more.

The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her master’s there in 1995 and in 2004 won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and Kenneth Pickar, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology. Faculty and students from Olin College, an engineering school near Boston, were also involved.

The flurry of activity was taking place at D-Lab, a research center and set of courses at M.I.T. devoted to devising cheap technologies that could have a big effect in impoverished communities. In homage to Ms. Smith’s passion for attacking poverty from the ground up, the lab is nicknamed “Amy’s World.”

Typically, D-Lab sends students abroad in midwinter breaks to work with people who are struggling with a lack of clean water, electricity, cooking fuels or mechanical power to turn crops into products. For four weeks, though, the real world had come to M.I.T.

Throughout the workshop, Ms. Smith served as scoutmaster, cheerleader, cook and personal shopper (when work flowed deep into the night), and she provided periodic reality checks.

She seemed dazed at times, but never fazed. “Everyone calls this an experiment,” Ms. Smith said of the workshop, the first of its kind. “I call it the realization of a vision.”

The work itself was often two steps back, not one step forward. As Lhamotso, a young woman from Tibet, and Laura Stupin, who just graduated from Olin, wrestled with a whirring Rube Goldberg mash-up of bicycle and grain mill, the chain slipped with a loud clang.

“We have a real friction problem,” Ms. Stupin yelled.

The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world’s poorest places.

“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”

She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”

Developing a pedal-powered grain mill or a backpack for water, as workshop participants did, was only a first step. The teams also had to be sure that their creations could be built of local materials cheaply enough to be bought by the world’s poorest people, that they could be fixed easily and fit ways of living that have deep-rooted rhythms.

The workshop began in mid-July, with the arrival of nearly 50 visitors from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Tanzania, Tibet and other countries.

Most of the $200,000 budget was provided by donations from individuals and private groups, including the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which supports university programs to develop commercially viable products that advance society.

The workshop began with a lecture by Paul Polak, a psychiatrist turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems of the poor. Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.

He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up, including the importance of first listening and watching, then following the old dictum “small is beautiful” with another, equally important one: “cheap is beautiful.”

The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments — like a drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmer’s income rises. Dr. Polak said in an interview that at least in the classroom, the push for such initiatives was coming from young people.

Ms. Smith said she wanted to avoid having the workshop end up as yet another academic exercise where the only outcome is often a set of paper proceedings or pledges. This time, she said, the goal was “no paper, just prototypes.”

In fact, in the first days of the workshop, it seemed that the only paper in evidence was an ever-spreading, flower-petal array of blue, green, pink and yellow sticky notes on walls and blackboards. The notes charted the progression from basic needs (water, food, energy, health) to specific issues (a three-mile hike to and from the nearest water supply in a Tanzanian village, the lack of a well-testing kit that a Bangladeshi village clinic could afford).

Ms. Smith placed participants in project teams. Then came round-table discussions, rough sketches, technical drawings and the first three-dimensional models.

Half a dozen volunteer mentors helped the participants make their ideas more concrete. Some were academics, like Ariel Phillips of Harvard, whose specialty is group dynamics. Others were drawn from Ms. Smith’s black book filled with an array of fixers and crafters — people whose careers have been spent solving problems by turning metal, plastic, wood, circuitry and motors into working devices. They included Dennis Nagle, a former weapons designer who abandoned the profession, he said, during the Summer of Love and turned to lighting design and other things, like the 24-ton array of speaker cabinets for a Guns N’ Roses concert.

The mentors’ task was making things work. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on the verge of a Home Depot run,” announced Jock Brandis, who had driven to the workshop from Wilmington, N.C. After a career building contraptions on movie sets, Mr. Brandis now helps run the Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village work.

Mr. Brandis noted that the budget for developing a peanut sheller for a Malian village was far different from that for building a camera-toting vehicle in rural Mexico to film Antonio Banderas galloping through the desert as Zorro. But the challenge of filling a niche with limited materials and tools is similar.

The other similarity is that both kinds of design begin with a blank slate. As Mr. Brandis put it: “It’s, ‘Here’s the model high-rise made of Styrofoam, and then the flying saucer has to fly into it, and we need to shoot it three times from three different angles, and next Tuesday it’s got to happen.’ ”

At the workshop, Mr. Brandis examined with approval one group’s design for an oven with three grates of progressively finer mesh to hold charcoal fuel, so that big pieces that have not burned down stay separate from more fully consumed fuel, limiting harmful smoke.

“What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives more efficient,” he said. “That’s what the big revolution in America was between 1860 and 1960 — that a person doing a day’s work can produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable and that means he has more time to do other things.”

Ashley Thomas, an entering senior at M.I.T., explained the appeal of such work while struggling with a teetering metal frame for a cooler that uses evaporation from wet fabric instead of electrical components to draw heat from its contents. The idea was conceived with participants from Tibet, where meat must be stored for weeks in isolated rural areas, and India, where heat can quickly ruin a vendor’s inventory.

“Imagine a fruit vendor in a rural area or the slums,” explained Deepa Dubey, a partner of Ms. Thomas, who studies product design as a graduate student in Kanpur, India. “He comes with all his fruit and vegetables. At the end of the day he makes one dollar, and whatever is left he has to throw it away because he can’t store it.”

Ms. Thomas said, “Amy’s class is about the hardest class to get into at M.I.T., including at the Sloan School, which is basically about how to make a million dollars after you graduate.”

She added: “It’s taking industrial design theory and applying it to where you can have the greatest impact. Here, $5 worth of angle iron and towels could mean a month’s supply of food. To me, that’s just worth so much more than spending that amount of time working on designing a slick new computer.”