29 Comments
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Jon Leventhal's avatar

On board 100% with your mission & model, so needed currently. I only wish you could accommodate adult learners, perhaps as UATX inevitably grow this will become possible. Keep up the amazing work.

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Matt Allan Degra's avatar

I’m totally with you. Waiting as well!

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laura's avatar

me too!!!

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Hershall's avatar

I am glad you still call your enrollees “students”.

Many others call them “learners”. Not a good change.

Thank you.

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Mike's avatar

This is what is needed. Universities have become brand names and rely on the tuition to keep their business model alive. So they will reward students with inflated grades for marginal effort.

When I was in college, there was no hand holding. Students formed their own study groups. Most courses had a couple midterm exams and a final. This quickly weeded out students who were not willing to put in the effort. By the time I hit my upper division courses, the number of students had dropped. What remained were students who were either smart or worked hard. Courses then became more expansive as students could handle the workload. This made courses better. Not every student belongs in college, let alone a high priced one in order to buy that brand name.

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Paul Dawson's avatar

As a retired polisci faculty member, after having taught for 49 years at Oberlin, I applaud and wish u great and increasingly well-leveraged success.

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Alec's avatar

Israeli Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, asserted that Israel’s assault on Gaza is a “textbook case of genocide”.Segal referred to initial examples of “special intent for genocide”. He included defence secretary Yoav Gallant proclaiming “we’re fighting human animals” and “acting accordingly”. Segal also noted Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari saying “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy”.

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2024/06/13/israel-tweet-genocide/

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Sifrid's avatar

just wondering since you taught at Oberlin. I have a Polisi bassoon. Is that somehow related to your faculty position (I'm thinking that Polisi might have endowed a chair or something). Thanks.

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Stephen Collins's avatar

I'm working on my daughter and son-in-law on behalf of my granddaughters. Hope it works in four years. Hee!Hee!

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Richard Baker's avatar

Go UATX!

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Immanuel Can's avatar

I really admire your philosophy. Were I younger, I think I might move to Texas and teach for UATX. Too bad you weren't up-and-running before I retired.

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Jim Carmine's avatar

Retired philosophy professor myself, sending my youngest here this fall. We are very optimistic. A true adventure.

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Immanuel Can's avatar

My faculties, the Ed Facs are the most "woke," awful places these days -- worse, even, than the "studies studies" group. So it's a joy to find an educational institution that takes education seriously again. I have nothing but enthusiasm for what UATX is aiming at doing.

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Jim Carmine's avatar

By a large margin, the least competent faculty I have ever met are Ed faculty and Social Work faculty, with Applied Psychology close behind. These three groups swallowed and put into practice, without any critical distance whatsoever, the very bizarre so-called Critical Theory dreamed up by the Deconstructionists and Post-Modernists.

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Immanuel Can's avatar

And they're indoctrinatory. They don't announce to their student / victims that they're following contentious, Neo-Marxist theories, like those of Freire and Foucault; they just drill them into them, without announcing what they're doing. They say even less to their teacher-trainees, even while they continue to indoctrinate them...they just sell them on "educational strategies" and "educational values" that are surreptitiously coded Marxist, and which then get transferred into public education practice as a kind of viral set of practices. Then they insist, "we don't teach Critical Theory," merely because they never announce that they're DOING it to people. Faculties of Education have turned out to be the least genuinely educational faculty on campus. I hope UATX has a much better strategy of educating future teachers -- I would recommend a mentorship program.

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Terry's avatar

My daughter is at a nearly-free community college, doing biotechnology and working at a big pharma paid internship, so she's all set. Had she been 2 years younger, she might have entertained UATX. Anyway, Godspeed and I wish you every success!

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Sifrid's avatar

You guys are providing a heroic service. I'm so jealous of your students. Luckily, I was at university in the late 70s and early 80s, and all of my instructors were serious and focused on teaching subjects not ideology. I got degrees in music theory, linguistics, and German, and none of them ever got me a job, but I've never regretted my decisions.

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Sarah F's avatar

Wahoo! Happy day! Keep going!

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ABM's avatar

This would be an excellent model for “continuing education” no matter the discipline involved. As a law school graduate and practicing attorney I had the opportunity to design and “teach” both continuing legal education courses as well as a course in Alternative Dispute Resolution for legal assistants. Many of the attorneys attending the courses spent time on working their files while many of the legal assistant students rose to the challenge of their assignments. Clearly the first group saw the class as an inconvenience while the students so this as an opportunity to learn.

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JONATHAN MICHAEL Regan's avatar

When are you going to start a summer extension program for adults who want to further their education?

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Douglas Levene's avatar

If the Administration had its wits about it, it would insist that universities grade on a normal curve as a requirement for accreditation.

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Luke Gibbs's avatar

Love this, I went to university 20 years ago for nursing and when I applied my conception of academia to the task I was shot down and belittled, told it's uncouth to engage with a topic not simply taking things for granted because the lady professor was the most published prof on the faculty. They ran me out, failed my assignments and labelled me as a mysoginist (I'm not, I treated them like equals) and insinuated I was kind of a creep because I was interested in maternity nursing.

Fuck that, i learnt one thing though, the conception of tertiary education we are sold is as utopian as the marxist ideas they drape themselves in now.

(That doesn't mean there isn't genuinely brilliant people at University)

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Joe Horton's avatar

So, first year looks like a lot of photographs. Would have been a lot more enlightening video if you show what’s being covered and how students engage with it. This is more like a rush video for fraternities.

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Douglas Groothuis's avatar

I commend your efforts. One student told me she should not have to read material outside of class! What was she thinking college was? We also have to work hard to explain the idea of authentic authorship in an age of AI.

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