American higher education now justifies itself on economic grounds: that we are producing the workforce for a global world. Such rhetoric has defined its function and has become its purpose. When was the last time debates around education articulated the virtues of higher thought, scholarship, a liberal education in the sense of one that frees the mind? When was the last time we explored the impact an idea, a novel, or a work of art can have on a person and on what they might decide to do with it? The danger of losing Cooper Union to the privatized, tuition-based educational model is not simply that we would lose one of the last bastions of non-instrumentalized education. The danger lies also in the fact that it would be like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, as even tuition-based institutions are faltering everywhere.

See also: Kevin Slavin’s rousing speech at the Cooper Union Community Summit

Also related: cooperunion.biz, a satire of both Cooper Union’s financial situation, and the “educational colonialism” model of NYU

Link

Lately I’ve been doing some projects that involve serving tiny self-contained websites on autonomous Linksys WRT54GL routers running OpenWRT. That is, websites you can only access by connecting to a specific wifi signal. In a creative sense I like the notion of giving web pages a physical presence, of focusing on a particular audience in a particular place. The technology is also pretty fun to work with.

I am a big proponent of this type of informal education and must share a related effort called The School of Mathematics. It’s a free, ongoing workshop that meets in a Brooklyn studio on Saturdays. From the most recent email announcement:

We will discuss probability: either its origins (what does it even mean?) or its applications (game theory).

Meeting at 11am, bagels at 10:45.

Link