While Larry Sumers Is Off at Davos…
Posted on January 30th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
…and Bill Kirby twists in the wind….
Stanford has posted dozens of lectures, interviews, speeches, performances and more on iTunes.
And they’re all free….
It’s this kind of exciting initiative that shows why the chaos at Harvard matters: It’s not just a getting of what isn’t happening at Harvard, but what is happening at other universities. I’ll bet that no one at Harvard has even considered such a move. And with a new dean in the works, I’d say that Harvardâif it even were able to do such a thingâis at least a year behind Stanford.
Which makes me repeat my suggestion to the Harvard community: If you don’t stand and fight, the Summers presidencyâa time of scandal and controversy, anger and frustrationâmay prove to be the years during which Harvard loses its foremost spot in American education.
Welcome to the new world, Harvard. There’s no room for complacency….
5 Responses
1/31/2006 1:13 am
Don’t count Harvard out in that department. They probably just want to do it right. Check out the excellent quality video for Sandel’s Justice course here:
http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2005-06/courses/govt.jsp#e-1045
You can preview the first two lectures free online!
1/31/2006 1:14 am
http://www.extension.harvard.edu
/2005-06/courses/govt.jsp#e-1045
1/31/2006 1:18 am
And…
http://www.thecrimson.com
/article.aspx?ref=510065
1/31/2006 2:58 pm
I’m not counting Harvard out by any means…but as far as “wanting to do it right” goes, Stanford’s page is pretty nice, and they’ll surely improve it as time passes.
I took a look at the first two Sandel lectures…the page they’re on is really poorly designed and they require RealPlayer, which (folks at Stanford surely know) is a hideous, slow, hard disc-consuming, spyware-laden program…that won’t play on iPods.
And frankly, these days, if something won’t play on an iPod, it’s the old “if a tree fell in a forest” situation.
But even if I did want to watch them…I can “preview” them online?
Stanford is giving this stuff away…
1/31/2006 7:57 pm
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510941
Harry Lewis is making his course available as a podcast (whether it will be publicly available, I do not know). One could, of course, note that given your post about Harvard falling behind under Summers/Kirby, it is appropriate that this move would come from Lewis.