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AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

Brookings Institution Fellow Diane Ravitch let slip a revolutionary notion when she suggested in a recent Washington Post column that prospective high school teachers should major in the subject that they plan to teach, instead of majoring in education.

What a concept! Just imagine history teachers having history degrees, science teachers having degrees in science, English teachers having majored in English.

While this idea hardly sounds controversial, it’s apparently a bit of a stretch for Congress. When Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) proposed that academic institutions receiving government funds should adopt this policy, Republicans whined that the federal government shouldn’t tell states how to prepare future teachers, and Senator Ted Kennedy led his fellow Democrats in saying that the plan just might not be fitting either.

According to Ravitch, the biggest scandal in education these days is that three-quarters of our elementary school teachers and one-third of our high-school teachers majored in education. Might that explain the generally poor performance of American students—and the fact that they exceeded only Cyprus and South Africa in standardized test scores?

"An undergraduate major in education makes little sense," says Ravitch. "What is the point of learning how to teach, if you don’t know what to teach?" This is "just as bad as a law school where future lawyers study how to try cases, how to understand the psyches of their clients, and how to manage a law firm, but never study the law."

MIT ‘COMPUTEROIDS’

According to famed futurist Alvin Toffler, "the line between human and computer at some point will become completely blurred."

Toffler may have been thinking of someone like Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Leonard Foner when he made this statement. Described in a recent MSNBC news story as "a collision between an oversized kid and a Nintendo machine," Foner, an MIT graduate student, trots around the Cambridge campus sporting a chunky eyepiece that protrudes from his left eye and rests on a pair of Terminator sunglasses. His outfit is completed by a black vest, filled with circuits and computer hardware, ending in a hard drive nestled in the small of his back.

Foner is one of a group of researchers who call themselves the ‘borg. Their current project is testing the feasibility of "wearable" computers—small enough to fit into hip pockets, but powerful enough to access the world’s information.

While today’s "wearable" models look a bit cumbersome, the prospect of developing smaller, more streamlined wearables is what attracts MIT’s young pioneers to this high-tech project. Instead of a keyboard or a mouse, the body attachments contain wireless modems, processing chips—and sometimes miniature video monitors and handheld keypads, allowing the wearers to enter information almost as quickly as one can talk.

The wearable software can remind the wearer of appointments, let him/her take notes, and surf the Net. It can also analyze faces that the wearer finds unrecognizable and whisper a name through a tiny ear speaker.

Are these ‘borgs actually trendsetters in the area of merging technology and flesh?

Stay tuned. 

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT

If you ask Dr. Joyce Brothers or P.J. O’Rourke whether they support free speech on college campuses, they would probably say yes.

But these two high-profile speakers, along with James Carville, Anita Hill, Johnnie Cochran, Magic Johnson and Ralph Reed, scarfed up hefty fees of $10,000 to $25,000 apiece during the past academic year for talks they made on the campus of Cornell University.

And that’s not all. According to a piece by Cornell profs Glenn Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the biggest stars in the lecture universe receive truly stratospheric fees. Colin Powell gets an average of $60,000 while Tom Peters will chat up your campus group about the search for excellence for only $75,000 a pop.

The Cornell profs suggest that some of the perks offered to campus speakers these days are reminiscent of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. For example, even though the Ithaca airport is only minutes from the Cornell campus, James Carville "insisted that he be whisked from his plane to a limo equipped with a telephone. Ed Bradley recently demanded transportation via a private jet in addition to his $30,000 fee."

To keep their demand on the front burner, many speakers rely on television. Baltimore Sun scribe and pundit Jack Germond disclosed last year that his seat on The McLaughlin Group translated into enough lecture circuit revenue to put his children through college.

What forces are keeping this going? The profs explain that a large percentage of these hefty speakers’ earnings come from student activity fees, which means that those who have no interest in hearing G. Gordon Liddy—or Dr. Ruth—are subsidizing those who do.

Could the astronomical lecture fees be more fruitfully used for other purposes? Absolutely. Since college campuses are hardly the isolated backwaters that they were 20-30 years ago, why pay the equivalent of a year’s room, board, and tuition for a speaker who you can see every week on the tube?

Although it may be "impossible to establish colleges and univerities as celebrity-free zones, we can begin by putting our money where our values are," says the Cornell duo, adding that "institutions of higher learning should resolve to pay no visiting speaker more than $2,000 plus expenses."

RETURN TO ‘STANDARDS’?

Herman Badillo, education advisor to Big Apple Mayor Rudy Giuliani, probably never thought of himself as a revolutionary.

But that’s what’s being whispered in the corridors of the City University of New York (CUNY), where Badillo effectively steered the board of trustees into canceling most of its remedial classes.

Badillo, a recent convert to the Republican Party, says that although he never thought of the move to shore up academic standards as a right-wing GOP plot, these are the accusations he frequently sees coming his way.

In fact, Marilyn Gittell, who heads a left-leaning policy center at CUNY, sees the move as one which will encourage an "elite direction of colleges that limits the government’s role and stress privatization."

The important thing, however, is will it set the tone for re-invigorating academic standards?

NEW VIEW OF TOP SCHOOLS

A new book, The Select: Realities of Life and Learning in America’s Elite Colleges, vows to "provide a realistic picture of what life is like on the campuses of America’s most prestigious colleges."

The list of 20 colleges and universities contains some obvious names, e.g., the eight Ivy League schools. Author Howard Greene lists nine other private institutions, Duke, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Stanford, Wesleyan, the U. of Chicago, MIT, and Williams. Only three public institutions, U. of California (Berkeley), U. of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the U. of Wisconsin (Madison), landed in the "select" category.

Greene, a college placement consultant, based his findings on a survey of 4,000 students on the 20 campuses. Although the new ratings guide omits certain prestige campuses like Swarthmore and the California Institute of Technology, Greene explained that "he just plain ran out of time and energy."

BAR THE DOOR?

When officials at Stonehill College in Massachusetts let apparent alumnus and potential donor, Arthur Roberts, stay in a campus guesthouse recently, he held a flurry of meetings with administrators, suggesting that he might make a $5 million donation to the school.

Imagine the shock when Stonehill honchos discovered that Roberts was a convicted felon, who was facing fraud charges in Texas.

The Chronicle of Higher Education says that college officials became a bit suspicious when Roberts, who had even engaged lawyers to draw up a trust, continued stalling to avoid coming up with his promised gift. After learning he had been indicted for securities fraud, the campus police paid a visit on Roberts, who high-tailed it off the Stonehill campus and was arrested later that very day.