“Harvard sees me as a dollar sign, and not a person,” wrote one student on a petition currently circulating. The university did not respond to requests to comment. (link)

“With a significantly reduced value proposition, you should not be surprised that people will ask for lower fees,” said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD. “In the long run, the unbundling of educational content, delivery and accreditation through digitalisation will make that inevitable anyway.”

I am no fan of much of what Andreas Schleicher says about education, and the above views have been circulating since at least the mid-1990s. I have been sceptical, and would add many caveats. Now I think I may have been too cautious, and have underestimated how fast the political landscape may change. If he and others turn out to be right, the traditional universities have only themselves to blame. The lower piece of bread of the educational sandwich may well be swallowed whole, but much of the filling is going to go, too. For the record, at least with respect to medicine and some other professional domains, the unbundling existed in the past, and it is not hard to reimagine how things could change back. Possibly for the better, even without the emetic that is Covid.

US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning | Financial Times

On September 1, I’m scheduled to teach 170 students in a windowless room. After 12 sessions of 3 hours in the sealed room with 170 people, 50 of them will then disperse back to their 20+ native countries for the holidays. If the producers of Contagion decide on a sequel, I have an idea for their opening scene.

Post Corona: Higher Ed, Part Deux | No Mercy / No Malice

Q: If you had to rate your satisfaction with your life so far, out of 10, what would you score?

A: I would be very dissatisfied with my life if it was ruled by marks out of 10.

Lovely answer. Interview with Jennifer Pike: My ambition is to continue fighting for the future of classical music

Someone in your family has fallen ill with a respiratory infection that has already killed large numbers. Your small house means that you do not have enough room to quarantine them. Your have little money, and the hospitals are full. You contact the local public health authority.

Not to worry, you are told: A crew will be by shortly to set up a sturdy, well-ventilated, portable, tiny house in your yard. Once installed, your family member will be free to convalesce in comfort. You can deliver home-cooked meals to their door and communicate through open windows — and a trained nurse will be by for regular examinations. And no, there will be no charge for the house.

A fascinating story by Naomi Klein in the Intercept. Seemingly from a time when government knew what government was for.

This is not a dispatch from some future functional United States, one with a government capable of caring for its people in the midst of spiraling economic carnage and a public health emergency. It’s a dispatch from this country’s past, a time eight decades ago when it similarly found itself in the two-fisted grip of an even deeper economic crisis (the Great Depression), and a surging contagious respiratory illness (tuberculosis).

How Not to Lose the Covid-19 Lockdown Generation

I thought the above quote was going to be from an exchange between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. But no, it was some advice from a mother to her son (Richard Seaman) on the choice of his bride.

At a party earlier that year he had met Erika Popp, the daughter of a director of BMW. When they decided to get married his mother disinherited him. Her final words to him were: ‘Dear boy, I would rather see you lying in your coffin than that you should contract this disastrous marriage.’

Seaman was dead six months later in a crash on the track so his mother did not have to wait long. Even the spectators got in the spirit of things:

During a race on the Pescara circuit in Italy in 1937, a driver crashed into a marker stone and collided with another car before spinning off into the crowd. Four spectators were killed at the scene, others had their legs severed and five died later from their injuries. ‘The race continued,’ Williams reports, ‘as races always did.’ After the 1955 Le Mans disaster, in which 83 people were killed by flying debris, crowd safety was vastly improved, but in Seaman’s day spectators died almost as often as drivers.

Now attitudes are different: even our attitude to the nuts and bolts:

The [F1]regulations cover everything from engine size to aerodynamic shape, and part of the game is to work out how much you can get away with while still obeying them. Some innovations are modest. Before it was banned in 2012, teams used helium rather than compressed air to power the guns used to remove wheel nuts during pit stops. The helium’s lower density made the guns spin faster, allowing them to get the nuts off fractionally quicker. The incremental gains add up. When the F1 championship began in the 1950s the average pit stop took 67 seconds. Nowadays a decent one takes around two seconds.

The power of incremental change.

Jon Day · Dear boy, I’d rather see you in your coffin: Paid to Race · LRB 16 July 2020

Two letters in the LRB on the now settled status of student hygiene.

The first from Otto Saumarez Smith:

Keith Thomas reminisces about his introduction to regular baths when at Oxford in the 1950s (LRB, 16 July). The architectural historian Gavin Stamp once told me that when George Frederick Bodley came to build new student accommodation at King’s College, Cambridge in 1888, he asked the fellows whether he should include a bathroom, but was told not to be ridiculous: as terms were only eight weeks long the undergraduates could bathe after they got home.

The second from Richard J Evans, in conversation with a porter at an Oxford college:

‘What’s the main difference between the old days and now?’ I once asked him. ‘Well, sir,’ he replied, after some thought, ‘in the old days the young gentlemen used to change their shirt every day and take a bath once a week. Nowadays they take a bath every day and change their shirt once a week.’ It was clear from the shaking of his head that he did not regard this as an improvement.

I was delighted to get out of university halls, to the luxury of a toilet and bathroom only shared with five fellow students (and their occasional guests). The downsides included rodents, and ice on the inside of the bathroom windows. My memory is that the rent in 1977 was £1.85 per person for a salubrious🤣 central location on the Westgate road (opposite the Harley-Davidson shop, and a house of dubious repute). I was in hospital for a few weeks (as a patient) during this period and, at discharge, my father picked me up at the hospital, and we drove to the house so that I could collect some more clothes before heading back to my parents home;  he knew better than to come in.

From an article in the Atlantic a couple of years back (but the song remains the same).

“I used to joke that I could just take all my papers and statistical programs and globally replace hospitals with schools, doctors with teachers and patients with students,” says Dartmouth College’s Douglas Staiger, one of the few U.S. economists who studies both education and health care.

Both systems are more market driven than in just about any other country, which makes them more innovative—but also less coherent and more exploitive.

State cutbacks did not necessarily make colleges more efficient, which was the hope; they made colleges more entrepreneurial.

Why Is College in America So Expensive? – The Atlantic

You can even get a degree in this sort of behaviour, now: ouroboros studies.

Roll Over Beethoven it is not.

At the same time, Vox found ways of reaching groups of voters who were disgruntled by other aspects of modern life that the mainstream parties weren’t addressing. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: they do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favourable demographic. New political parties now operate like that: you can bundle together issues, repackage them, and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging – based on exactly the same kind of market research – that you know has worked in other places. The ingredients of Vox were the leftover issues, the ones the others had ignored or underrated, such as opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to same-sex marriage; opposition to feminism; opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration… It wasn’t an ideology on offer, it was an identity: carefully curated, packaged for easy consumption, queued up and ready to be “boosted” by a viral campaign.

Anne Applebaum in the Twilight of Democracy. Her description of Boris Johnson — her once fellow traveller — is well worth a read; I am glad the lawyers thought so too.

“Although adult beetles were easily eaten by frogs, 90% of swallowed beetles were excreted within 6 h (0.1–6.0 h) after being eaten and, surprisingly, were still alive.” The aquatic beetle Regimbartia attenuata can swim right through a frog, found biologist Shinji Sugiura. ( Current Biology paper) (Watch a video of it happening in The New York Times, if that’s what you’re into.)

Nature Briefing reporting on a story in the New York Times

I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme, to try therewith the celebrated Phenomena of Colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the Suns light…but I surprised to see them in an oblong form; which, according to the received laws of Refraction, I expected should have been circular.

Well, Isaac Newton obviously had better functioning shutters than my bedroom blackout blinds. Most summer mornings (which at this latitude last much of the night…) I receive — without choice — lessons in physics 101. Here are some iPhone shots from this morning. The quote says a lot about science: note the terms, convenient quantity, surprised and expected.