Our Vice-Chancellor

Many a university president has felt a frisson on reading the news that various consortia are intent on forging an online teaching presence that will reach out in what might seem to some like a quasi-imperial way (not just MIT and Stanford but also Embanet/Compass, 2tor, Coursera and the Minerva Project). No one I know thinks that these online consortia will have immediate effects in the manner of the raft of books that are direct descendants from the dot.com days, with all their corporate techno-hype (see the recent piece by Hiltzik on this agenda). But no one I know thinks that things will just stay the same either.

Over a long time, it has become clearer and clearer that the explanation of how we live has to feature not just the clash of “large” social forces, but also all the “little” things that keep us mobile, that run relay on our lives, the scaffolding that is also the building. The life of an academic is not just supported by these little things but made possible by them. Things like the feel of favorite pens (I can’t stand ballpoint pens), the kind of paper that can stand up to exclamations and repeated crossings out, the various software packages (from the ubiquitous Word and Outlook to Endnote, RefWorks or Zotero).