Ride of my Life

Mick Hagen’s ride of through life

 
 
 
Category Archive *Education*
Barack Obama tweets

The man actually cares about me. I’m almost a democrat.

 
For real

 
NACAC

I’m at NACAC right now in Seattle.  It’s the biggest conference of the year surrounding college admissions, guidance counselors, admissions officers, etc.  I’m looking forward to these next few days.  They are extremely important for us.  Word.

 
Randy Pausch

This isn’t new news. But I just wanted to say that this guy is a hero.  He’s the Carnegie Mellon professor (dying of cancer at the time) who became famous with his Last Lecture (almost 6 million views).  Wall Street Journal and New York Times have his story covered really well.  His life recently came to an end.  But for real, he’s a hero.

 
Academic Freedom

I find this news interesting.  UC Berkeley and Stanford are refusing valuable federal funding for the sake of academic freedom.  Basically, the feds (in name of Homeland Security) wanna have a little more control over what’s published in the university research along with who and who can’t conduct the research.  This sort of thing obviously cripples the research process as important findings and discoveries can be kept unpublished.  This can potentially put our American schools at a huge disadvantage in especially some of the world’s most competitive fields like science and engineering.  Anyway, Stanford and UC Berkeley have taken a stand against it and decided not to take that federal funding.

“When confronted by a restriction that in any way limits our ability to publish, then we fight back,” said Carol Mimura of UC Berkeley. “It is absolutely essential that we publish what we do here, that we own, because academic freedom is sacrosanct.”

There have already been a number of occasions where the government has “edited” major research.

A new major study of 20 top schools found 180 instances of “troublesome clauses” attached by the federal government to research contracts – up from 138 in 2004

I wonder what some of those “troublesome clauses” were and what important findings were kept from us.  Who knows.

 
After Harvard, what’s next?

This is admirable I suppose.