All the good Chronicle of Higher Ed articles are under lockdown these days.

I’m not going to link to a paywall article, because that’s a terrible move, but I will tell you that there was an article posted today on Kevin Runner, an education software guy, and his new environmental epiphany-slash-alternative university.

Here’s what Mr Runner’s LinkedIn has to say about Runchero U:

With a commitment to environmental sustainability, agricultural innovation and a healthy, thriving local community, at Runchero we’re on a mission. Situated on 2000 acres of Kentucky farmland in Shelby and Washington Counties, we are launching leading-edge initiatives in organic agriculture, hemp farming, vertical farming, aquaponics, alternative energy and ecotourism. We have begun to establish job-creating local enterprises, and we will soon be opening the doors of Runchero University, a non-traditional, forward-thinking educational organization projected to collaborate with the State of Kentucky, local universities and local
businesses on accredited degree programs, ongoing research projects, and certified vocational and professional skills training.

I keep thinking about this–about what it would mean to start an alternative university. The funny thing is, so far all the alternatives are leftward bent (with the exception of perhaps Hillsdale College). There was an MIT offshoot I read about a while back that looked promising. It focused on first-gen college students more than the environment. And it sounds like Jordan Peterson is finally getting moving on his online AI-driven university model.

It’ll be interesting to watch where these go, but I don’t really consider them alternatives to the university. Unless the specifically address the entrenched ideology issue that higher education (actually, make that all education) is having, “alt” it is not.

Runchero reminds me a little bit of an MFA program that I was interested in for a few months. It was a program in book arts, where you learned how to print and bind books, how to restore them, and about the book as art and artifact. Lots of fun, but also not much immediate applicability to the outside. The main benefit would like in your being creative enough to take what you learned and apply it to a real-life problem.

And that, now that I write about it with those words, is much the problem of pseudo-alt and legit universities these days. The value of the degree is in question, so what matters is how well the individual graduate leverages the degree. That is not a Learning Outcome that is taught in most universities, so you rely on the ingenuity, problem solving, and tenacity of the graduate in order to make your university look good.

The thing is, why would someone do that to make a university look good when they could do all that work to make themself look good?

(Tiny aside: let’s talk about tortured pronouns, yikes.)

Where’s the value-add?

I’m genuinely curious, because I would be very interested in backing and/or supporting and startup alt-u if it had the right chops.

Mr Runner’s software company – Runner – was my nemesis back in the halcyon days of my first job. (Just kidding, there were 28k students breathing down my neck every day – it was not living the dream.) Runner checks addresses in Banner, one of the more popular student databases on the market. Runner typically does a good job, and saves data entry monkeys a lot of work by populating city and state from an entered zip code. I liked that about Runner.

What I didn’t like about Runner were new construction projects. I don’t know how often they updated the local address validation tables, but sometimes Runner wouldn’t recognize an address as legitimate (even when both the Post Office and Google Maps would). The problem was that the auto-correct feature would change the address into something else, wouldn’t change it back, and there was no “manual override” feature.

You became stuck in an infinite loop of recursive address checking. No bueno.

I hope that they’ve fixed that since then, since it’s been a few years.

And I hope their university never gets stuck in that recursive feedback loop.

The kerfuffle in certain circles over Jordan B Peterson reminds me that 1. I haven’t written about his book yet, and 2. there was a bit in his book that made me go “Oh, this guy is still very much a faculty member” despite his being the recalcitrant, dissident faculty that we all want to like.

I think, as well (on what might be considered the leftish side), that the incremental remake of university administrations into analogues of private corporations is a mistake. I think that the science of management is a pseudo-discipline. I believe that government can, sometimes, be a force for good, as well as the necessary arbiter of a small set of necessary rules. Nonetheless, I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture…………….

I honestly remember there being more “there” when I first read this bit. I thought I remembered reading at least a paragraph on the positives and negatives of the university that ended in an typical faculty equivocation or digression or something equally handwavy.

Instead, now I’m getting the whiff of typical faculty butthurt. Something along the lines of : I liked the university the way it was and now these upstart non-rigorous disciplines (which is a bit rich coming from a psychologist, tbh) are alerting the public to the fact that we cannot live up to our promises and now my cushy job is in danger.

Most faculty cannot live with the fact that “a degree is something that you need to get a job” places the university squarely in the crosshairs of the capitalist marketplace. They instead imagine themselves to be in the pastoral world where only 2% of the richest, most intelligent men go to college, where they can be free of any and all constraints of the free market. Including the market of ideas and pesky things like funding.

Circling back to point 1, the only part of 12 Rules for Life that I’d reread is the last chapter about the light pen, but even that chapter begs the question IF YOU HAD A PEN AS COOL AS THAT WHY WOULDN’T YOU USE IT FOR EVERYTHING??

This is one of those books where I used sticky tabs to note passages I found interesting. But a month later, when I go back to find those passages, I’m really not sure what I’m looking at.