Alan Jacobs

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One of our favourite endpapers: The Wind in the Willows, illustration by E.H.Shepard

Why do the doomsayers exist? For one, it is common for each generation to think it is alive at the single most pivotal time in history. Surely we sit at a precipice, with the fate of everything, including higher education, in our hands in a way unknown to previous generations. Right? Doubtful, history suggests. A healthy skepticism about a world always on the verge of major change might be a useful antidote against panic.

Second, it turns out to be really difficult to predict the future. Most previous higher-education doomsayers were well intentioned and thoughtful, but that didn’t help them get it right. The world is complex, and those who merely extrapolate current trends into the future will get them largely wrong.

Finally, as we noted, many “objective” observers are anything but. Often they have a vested interest in getting us to worry. And it works. We read their articles and books, support them in elections, buy their consulting services, or donate to their causes.

When you are very young, you think old people must feel inside as old as they appear on the outside. But as you move towards agedness yourself, you realise that this is entirely wrong. People remain young on the inside, no matter how old they appear. The idea of ‘old’ people is therefore a misapprehension of our culture, which sees the split instant of a human lifetime as something elongated, divided into decades and years, persistently defined by a number. But there are no 'old people’. Everyone is young. The only clue you have about this is your own journey as a subjective intelligence looking out. You wait for a change to descend, some radical shift of thinking which will fit with your balding head or wrinkling face. But it doesn’t come: you get giddier and more childish. I had this insight very strongly at Mount Melleray, when I realised that all these men, like myself, were teenagers, or maybe children, in their heads.

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biblipeacay:

APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME—DUFY, RAOUL — LE BOEUF. BOIS ORIGINAL GRAVÉ POUR LE BESTIAIRE OU CORTÈGE D’ORPHÉE DE GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE. (30 X 21 CM). PARIS, DEPLANCHE, 1911, SOUS CHEMISE DEMI-MAROQUIN NOIR MODERNE. LOT SOLD. 4,000 EUR

A 2004 paper by education researcher Gary R. Pike published in Research in Higher Education … found the U.S. News rankings for 14 public research universities that are part of the Association of American Universities. Then, he compared them with scores on a separate measure, the National Survey of Student Engagement, that’s designed specifically to determine how much students engaged in “educationally purposeful activities that contribute to their learning and success.” There was virtually no correlation between the two sets of data.

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Photo of the Day: Tufa Towers

Photo by Marshall Fisher (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA); Mono Lake, California, USA

There is no such thing as practical knowledge, and so there is no such thing as a practical major. This country graduates 350,000 business majors a year. The metrics for those degrees are generally awful. But nobody ever includes them in their arguments about impractical majors, despite those bad numbers. And if you’re some 19 year old, out to choose a career path, business sure sounds practical. So they graduate with those degrees and flood the market with identical resumes and nobody will hire them. Meanwhile, they lost the opportunity to explore fields that they might have enjoyed, that might have deepened the information acquisition and evaluation skills that would allow them to adapt to a whole host of jobs, and that might have provided a civic and moral education. All to satisfy a vision of practicality that has no connection to replicable, reliable economic advantage.

What’s most depressing of all is that these changes of fortune for particular fields is always seen as worthy of mockery and not sympathy. I searched around for that New Republic article on social media and found plenty of people laughing at these kids and calling them chumps for following an educational fad. You just can’t win: if you pursue a field you actually like, they mock you for your impracticality. If you pursue a field out of a desire to chase the money, and you get unlucky, they mock you for choosing poorly. Whatever it takes to convince you that your unemployment is your own fault and not the fault of an economic system that serves only the 1%.

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architectural-review: Ralf Alwani, Mitten Crab Fishery and Eel Aquaculture

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text.

I am not joking; Adobe is not only logging what users are doing, they’re also sending those logs to their servers in such a way that anyone running one of the servers in between can listen in and know everything,

But wait, there’s more.

Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in DE4; this app was also scanning my computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers.

In. Plain. Text.

And just to be clear, this includes not just ebooks I opened in DE4, but also ebooks I store in calibre and every Epub ebook I happen to have sitting on my hard disk.

The Maker of man became Man that He, Ruler of the stars, might be nourished at the breast; that He, the Bread, might be hungry; that He, the Fountain, might thirst; that He, the Light, might sleep; that He, the Way, might be wearied by the journey; that He, the Truth, might be accused by false witnesses; that He, the Judge of the living and the dead, might be brought to trial by a mortal judge; that He, Justice, might be condemned by the unjust; that He, Discipline, might be scourged with whips; that He, the Grape, might be crowned with thorns; that He, the Foundation, might be suspended upon a cross; that Courage might be weakened; that Security might be wounded; that Life might die.