From the alumni page

These things have a habit of disappearing. This way I can hold on to them.

"I am most definitely not here to attack any individual, but let me share my perspective. My husband went to the old Unity in the late 70’s and it changed his life. I followed him here and later taught as an adjunct after I earned my MFA. We settled in Unity as a result of the incredible interaction between the college and the campus. We went to the Performing Arts Center for music, theater, lectures, and art. We held field days in Field of Dreams. I had Unity students in my science classroom up the road, for ITL experience. My kids checked out books at Quimby Library where I later donated my library of 5000 books. My husband became an administrator for NRCS and was able to hire other alums. We live just down the road and I drive past the sad, empty campus everyday. The lively interchanges at cross track are no more. The Cheeseman farmhouse has been sold, and I would think the original founders would be rolling in their graves. I always expected that both my sons would attend Unity. No way; they attended campuses that were IRL communities. My youngest, now at UMFarmington, had 100% in-person classes all throughout the pandemic. The value of the loyalty to the old Unity College is priceless. It has been squandered. There is a place for online classes, and I was a non-trad student and get it. But it shouldn’t be called Unity College. Melik traded in a shining diamond for a piece of dirty coal. He stole a name, a shared identity, from many people and that is why we are so upset. Enrollment data can be manipulated, as all data can, to infer what is not reality. Trust is lost. I worked with a middle school guidance counselor once who got his degree 100% online at Liberty University. You can imagine the result: bad. Taking the salary while the kids’ real needs went unmet. My husband, on the cusp of retirement, decries the lack of practical IRL knowledge of young hires. They are great with the tech but don’t have a clue on the landscape, so they struggle to gain the confidence of clients. Zoom school, for us teachers and students was a sham, as test scores are now revealing."

Professing

"You're a professor. Professors should profess." 

That's what one of my mentors told me, a long time ago. Back in the day, before online teaching and the general adjunct-ification of higher education worked together to bid down the price and intellectual capacity of the teaching help, a professor was supposed to have her own ideas about things. She was also supposed to be able to express them freely without fear of being fired or sidelined. Academic freedom of this kind had a purpose. It ensured the open marketplace of ideas could flourish, which itself aided in the development of modern liberal society: society with free markets, free speech, and free institutions. Free students led by free professors who grew up to be the building blocks of a free society. 

Through the free expression of ideas about culture, economics, business, politics, technology, and even education, modern society developed and moved away from the religious dogma in which it was founded. Think about just about any idea that has any importance, from the rule of law to the factory system to the US Constitution, and you notice that this idea, in its day, had detractors. But the marketplace of ideas won out, and today we are protected by the rule of law, our products are made by the factory system, and the US Constitution is still in force last time I checked. 

Try to imagine society without these ideas.

I have some strong opinions about a lot of things, but as a PhD-trained climate policy specialist who also studied "PPE" (politics, philosophy, and economics), I was encouraged to express these ideas without fear or restraint -- except the intellectual restraint that grew out of the facts themselves. 

Actually, I was required by the nature of my PhD program to express my ideas. 

If I hadn't had any ideas I would not have passed the program. And I kept having ideas and expressing them right up until the time that my having ideas, and the ideas I was having, became incompatible with the new so-called leadership of (some) parts of American higher education. 

Some folks just don't like ideas. 

Well, they didn't stop me. I've been at it again. 

Professing.

From the comment section of the New York Times:

Mick Womersley | Maine
Bret has made a workmanlike job of setting aside bias and exploring the options. I wish more conservatives would do the same. My only quibble is that he hasn't quite gotten his head around the math and so has picked, in a weak-minded way, the wrong option, doing nothing now. Global circulation is a complex dynamic system and requires a dynamic systems model. This kind of math isn't taught except in science programs. Commentators get it wrong. Yes, climate policy is a kind of insurance, an ounce of cure to avoid a pound of pain. So much is mentioned fairly. But the full scope of possible outcomes is missing or slighted. As one example, the results of the recent Thwaites Glacier expedition have served primarily to demonstrate that one possible outcome, the catastrophic melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is more likely than previously thought, with enough sea level rise as a result to swamp a good portion of the worlds largest cities. There are several other bad possible outcomes to discuss. They aren't. It isn't alarmist to cover all the bases. You buy house insurance to offset the risk of a drastic fire. It may be a low risk, but the results of the fire would be sufficiently bad that the conservative householder views the premium as a reasonable expense. Climate scientists have been asking the free market to pay the premium for decades and it hasn't done so. So we will instead choose to rebuild after the fire. That's the logical outcome of the thinking in this column.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/28/opinion/climate-change-bret-stephens.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/world-close-to-irreversible-climate-breakdown-warn-major-studies

College Nightmares

Otherwise happily retired, I still occasionally have long weird dreams about somehow righting the disaster that became our previous place of academic employment. 

This is of course my subconscious at work, and it signifies nothing except the weird workings of one fat old white guy's subconsciousness.

In this latest one, graduation was somehow held mistakenly outside Aimee's craft room window, and a board (bored) meeting followed. We were able to eavesdrop on all the lies and wool-over-eyes-pulling that went on, directly from the lips of the lier-in-chief to the ears of the gullible items supposedly responsible for an institution of higher education.

In the dream we were morbidly fascinated and outraged by all the BS that was spouted. At times we laughed our heads off, the lies were so fantastic. But nothing happened. No hard questions were asked, and none answered.

Especially, questions were not asked, or answered, about learning: when it happens, how it happens, how experienced teachers can make it happen, and how to measure that it actually has happened. 

Now, this was only a dream. But dreams do come true.

Specifically, on the spectrum of conscious knowledge, there are people who know and know what they know, people that don't know and do know what they don't know, and people that think they know but don't know what they don't know. 

If this all sounds rather Rumsfeld-ian, it may be because that former Secretary accidentally put his finger on, or in, a greater truth.

As did my dream.

The GOP War on College

The Comical Of Higher Edification has a moderately decent feature article, "above the fold," on the history of right-wing opposition to learning here. It's not behind a paywall but you will need to sign in.

It always fascinates me that right-wing types believe you can run a complicated modern country without the kinds of clever folks that earn advanced degrees. Where do they think all the computers and robots that do our work and make our houses and cars run, all the advanced medical care that keeps us well, and all the advanced weaponry that protects us against authoritarian states like Russia, China, and Iran, where do they thing it all comes from? 

Trump voters? Q-Anon? Don't make me laugh.

If you subtracted the combined output of clever people with advanced degrees from the economy, there wouldn't be very much left.

And of course, we have working examples of this. The new Trump-era book "The Divider" by Glaser and Baker, the husband/wife NYT best seller team, is useful here, recounting the absolutely mind-fucking thoughtless chaos inside the Trump White House, as Trump picked staffers and appointees for their loyalty and their "...from Central Casting" good looks, not their qualifications.

Of course, it burns right-wingers to the core that, once begun, higher education tends to produce liberal thinkers. 

Well, duh. The whole premise of scientific education is to learn to think without bias. That's the purpose of scientific logic, the use to which we put the theory of probability, and the rationale behind the need for statistical significance before publishing the results of a study.

But right-wing thinking seems full of thoughtless bias. Against people of color, against ideas, against sexual freedom, against different cultures. It's a morass of thoughtless nonsense.

It may be time to paraphrase the old RAF engineer's adage, "If flying were hard, the engineers would have to do it." 

If right-wing thinking were hard, people with college degrees would have to do it. But they can't do it, or won't, because it's not actually hard, just wrong. 

We should call it wrong-wing thinking.