…Larry Summers is being paid a lot for the use of his name and the occasional bon mot advising a start-up university currently known as “the Minerva Project.”

In its own words…

The Minerva Project is the first elite American University [sic] to be launched in a century. Minerva’s philosophy transforms every aspect of the university-student relationship in anticipation of students’ changing needs in an evolving world. Across a full life cycle of admission to instruction to post graduation [sic] support, The Minerva Project is rethinking the role of an elite institution of higher learning.

What does this rethinking involve?

Minerva says it will accept only really smart kids, “while giving no weight to lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate.”

Since the Internet “will continue to see [sic] a proliferation of free, high quality knowledge available to all,” Minerva will “deliver only the most rigorous, analytical courses that will synthesize such knowledge to prepare students to thrive in the real world.”

[Blogger: Not sure what that means, but doesn’t sound good for sociology and Latin!]

Finally,

The Minerva Project will also commit substantial resources not only to career services for current students, but to supporting its alumni throughout their careers with academic programs, personal publicity….

Personal publicity?

Perhaps I am unfair and Larry Summers is really quite deeply involved in Minerva. After all, it does sound like Summers’ idea of a university that he’d like to attend: No sports, no social life, no fraternities, no parties, no legacy kids, no giving back to the university (but instead it promotes your personal publicity), and any subject that does not have “real world” relevance won’t be taught. (Sorry about that, Elisa New!)

(It occurs to me that if everything Larry Summers did not want in a university were made tangible, it would be the Winklevoss twins.)

Minerva is the purest distillation of Larry Summers’ vision for Harvard back when he was president.

And you wonder why that didn’t work out.

But Minerva still has some kinks to resolve. For example, below is the seal of this new “university.” Note that its name and motto are written in a language that Minerva won’t actually be teaching.

img-about

Latin: It’s good for personal publicity!

What the Minerva website doesn’t tell you is that this is an online, for-profit venture backed by New York venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. Though it claims to be recruiting professors, its courses for the foreseeable future will consist of online videos, over which students are supposed to video-chat. Good luck with that.

The founder of Minerva is a guy named Ben Nelson, the former CEO of an online picture hosting site—never particularly successful, now owned by Hewlett-Packard—called Snapfish. (Never used it? Me neither.)

Nelson’s educational credentials are, well, slim: He has an undergraduate degree in economics and marketing from U-Penn.

Here’s a little snippet from an interview the San Jose Mercury News did with Nelson:

Q: Tell me how Minerva will work as an online-only school.

A: We simply cannot do it offline. You can’t aggregate that many great professors — or students — in one location. Offline classrooms have far too many limitations. You have lectures and recitations, and separately, seminars. Three days later you ask someone what you didn’t understand three days earlier. At Minerva, lectures and seminars will be melded together. We’ll have at-large lectures, where 25 students will simultaneously watch a class with a live professor, professors who are known to specialize in inspirational teaching, not just research. When someone raises their [sic] hand, the lecture pauses. The webcams come on, and students and professors engage in a debate. The seminars will be recorded and assessed, and will be part of how students will be evaluated.

The webcams come on! Ooh! Exciting!

I love the idea of Larry Summers giving an online lecture and then having to pause every time someone raises his or her hand.

Asked what courses Minerva will offer, Nelson says:

We’ll offer degrees in humanities, social science, computer science and business — what you’d find at Harvard or Wharton or MIT or Caltech. But we won’t have foreign-language majors. We won’t bother to charge students for stuff they can get for free elsewhere..

Huh?

Harvard will survive this. At the same time, universities such as Harvard and Yale would do well to continue reminding the world of their many virtues, because projects like this are good at pointing out where traditional universities fail, but are so oblivious to where they succeed…