Shots in the Dark

The Boston music school is now offering music courses, online and free.

Here’s from their press release:

Berkleemusic, the world’s largest online music school and the continuing online education division of Berklee College of Music, has signed an agreement with Coursera, an organization that offers classes from top universities and professors for free, to develop four online courses with some of their most popular instructors. These free online courses will be available to students across the globe in Spring 2013. The four Massive Open Online Courses (known as MOOCs) that will be offered are: Jazz Improvisation with 6-time GRAMMY-winner Gary Burton, Music Production Basics with Loudon Stearns, Introduction to Guitar from Thaddeus Hogarth, and Songwriting with Pat Pattison.

Pretty cool.

In the Times, Bill Pennington writes on the way that Harvard’s cheating scandal has prompted diminished pride in University athletics and a discussion over whether Harvard has compromised itself in trying to elevate its athletic program in recent years.

(Whew—sorry about that. It’s early.)

His story, which I’m reading online but may be Page 1: “Cheating Scandal Dulls Pride in Athletics at Harvard.”

(Despite what Drew Faust says about the scandal not being limited to any particular group of students, nobody really seems to believe her—another reason she probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. One gets the strong sense that, while what she said may be technically true, it is not fundamentally true.)

Pennington quotes senior Patrick Nash saying something that does feel true:

“Some athletes are here working hard, but others avoid academic challenges. You know you won’t find them in a deductive logic course, but you will find them in a much less taxing sociology course. They sometimes exist apart, and collectively gravitate to the same majors, like sociology or government. It’s known.”

A couple trends emerge from the article:

1) Harvard’s scandal, though it may be concentrated among athletes, is tainting the university more broadly.

2) It’s also tainting the Ivy League, when there’s not much evidence that the steps Harvard has taken to play in the big leagues, as it were, were also taken by other Ivies.

The article includes a bit of news that I hadn’t read before and seems to me quite shocking; Pennington reports that the basketball players who withdrew for a year to preserve their eligibility did so after receiving an email from a Harvard administrator encouraging them to do so, rather than be suspended for a year and lose a year of eligibility.

Casey, who was a preseason favorite for Ivy League player of the year, and Curry left Harvard days after a university administrator sent an e-mail message advising fall athletes who might be involved in the cheating scandal to consider taking a leave in order to preserve their eligibility.

Isn’t this like helping the cheaters cheat some more? By helping them to escape the consequences of their actions?

It certainly suggests that the Ad Board investigation is compromised, if a Harvard official is telling students how to mitigate its actions before the board has even finished its inquiry. (Of course, Drew Faust compromised it as well.)

I’m astounded by this piece of news, which suggest that a Harvard official has his priorities very, very wrong. If that’s the kind of message that Harvard authority figures send to students, no wonder they’re okay with cheating…..

He says that 47% of Americans pay no federal taxes and are wholly dependent on government, so he’ll never get their votes.

But in The Atlantic, David Graham shows that eight of the top 10 states with the highest number of non-federal taxpayers are red states.

Which makes sense-it’s the same phenomenon as the red states whose residents cry out against big government, yet those states take far more from that government than they pay in taxes….

And it also tends to be those same states which rank lowest on state-by-state education surveys. (Hello, Alabama!)

Basically, it’s the entire South, plus Idaho….

Because, you know, this changes everything.

Kudos to Harvard prof Karen L. King on what sounds like it could be a world-changing discovery….

“Has there been a presidential race in modern times featuring two candidates who have done so little over their lifetimes for our country, and who have so little substance to say about the future of our country?”

—Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, writing about Mitt Romney’s video gaffe in a piece that calls both candidates “arrogant and stupid.”

But…hang on a second, here. I’m not a Romney fan, but he did run for Senate, spend a term as governor, “save” the Olympics (which I guess counts as public service), and is now running for president—when he could be out on the golf course enjoying his millions. (And millions…and millions…)

As for Barack Obama…he was a community organizer, a state senator, a U.S. senator, and now president. And you’re saying he hasn’t done enough for our country?

And all this from a guy who has spent the last 20 years cashing Rupert Murdoch’s checks….

Her book, This Republic of Suffering, is the basis for a PBS “American Experience” tonight. Sounds pretty good.

Watch Death and the Civil War Extended Promo on PBS. See more from American Experience.

So it turns out that Mitt Romney really is as elitist and uncaring as you think….here’s the video (referenced by a poster below, thank you) in which Romney says that 47% of the electorate won’t vote for him because they pay no taxes and he won’t be able to convince them to take responsibility for their lives. The video, you can tell, was surreptitiously taken at a private fundraiser, possibly (and this would be delicious) by one of the wait staff….

I’m not sure he recovers from this.

(Mother Jones magazine, by the way, first posted this video and has some rather startling reporting to go along with it.)

The media boomlet sparked by Harvard’s cheating scandal continues: New York magazine’s cover story this week is called “Cheating Upwards,” and it explores why students who are both affluent and/or smart cheat:

…social psychologists say today’s high-school students live in a culture that, perhaps more than ever, fosters cheating, or at least the temptation to cheat. The prime offender, they say, is the increased emphasis on testing. Success in school today depends not just on the SAT, but on a raft of federal and state standardized ­exams, often starting as early as fourth grade and continuing throughout high school. More than ever, those tests determine where kids go to college….

In other words, kids cheat to get into Harvard, so they figure they might as well continue to cheat while they’re there.

I guess. But this description ignores the fact that, we are led to believe, a significant number of the alleged cheaters in the Harvard scandal were jocks, not intellectual overachievers.

Moreover, it’s hard to believe that a significant number of Harvard’s most impressive students were taking “Introduction to Congress.” It’s pretty rare that you find really great students, academically speaking, and a ton of jocks in the same class—unless it’s an out-of-concentration gut that they need to fulfill a requirement.

The article goes on to say that an obsession with scores leads kids to an ends-justify-the-means approach—while an emphasis on learning and improvement actually encourages, you know, learning and improvement.

It occurs to me that there’s a Rorschach test-quality to this scandal; we don’t know the facts, but already we see in it what we’re inclined to see. We don’t approve of jocks at Harvard; the jocks did it! We think moral values have declined; it’s symptomatic of moral entropy! We think kids are too obsessed with going to Harvard; it’s because they’re cheating for the test!

Another theory proposed in the New York article:

…the pressure to succeed, or the perception of it anyway, is often only greater for such students. Students who attend such schools often feel they not only have to live up to the reputation of the institution and the expectations that it brings, but that they have to compete, many of them for the first time, with a school full of kids as smart, or smarter, than they are. Harvard only admits so many Stuy students, Goldman Sachs will hire only so many Harvard kids….

So many choices! And so few facts are known. But I do think there’s one common denominator that emerges from these various theories: People are worried about the morality of kids competing so fiercely to get to Harvard—and aren’t convinced that Harvard does anything to improve them once they’re there.

Not for the first time, I’m glad I went to a college that was still remarkable, but didn’t have the pressure of being “#1,” and didn’t attract the kids who found that label important…

In the Times, Rebecca Harrington (Harvard ’08) argues that there’s a long tradition of cheating at Harvard, and she cites a bunch of examples to back this up. (Note to RH: You forgot Ted Kennedy.)

Cheating along the Charles, however, is nothing new. Periodic scandals have exposed dishonesty that would have made the institution’s Puritan and Congregationalist forebears weep. And it appears that, after decades of debate, Harvard students are still unsure of what, exactly, “cheating” means.

Meanwhile, Drew Faust gave an interview to the AP in which she insisted that the cheating scandal is not just an athletic problem.

“It is not about one student group,” Faust said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s not confined to any one student group.”

About this, two questions. First, why is Faust giving an interview to the AP about the cheating scandal? That seems…off-message. And two, how does she know inside details about the cheating—is she getting inside briefings from the Ad Board?

It sounds like she is; Faust says of the Ad Board, “It will, I expect, exonerate some number of these students.”

Which seems to me a problematic thing to say. How does she know? Is she prejudging the process, or is the process fixed? And however much she knows, should she really be giving details of her knowledge to the press before the investigation is completed?

Before being granted remarkable access to the White House, Lewis agreed to give the Administration quote approval….

I expect most journalists would have agreed to this quid pro quo; they probably shouldn’t. But Lewis will unquestionably get another bestseller out of this—and he’ll probably have some pretty interesting things to say about the president….