Those Who Walk in Darkness...

This is a reprint of my weekly column in the (Chester) Village News.  I post it here to encourage my readers to consider taking Coursera's excellent online course on Global Climate Change.

Isaiah surely had something else in mind when he said, "The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light."  And that's fine.

An Old Testament prophet would be concerned with those who had turned their backs on a creed they once believed, commandments they once obeyed, rites they once observed. 

For me - a secular humanist struggling to make the world slightly more civilized - this passage sheds light on a different group:  People who choose not to see the light - to remain deliberately ignorant, because ignorance suits them better than changing long-held beliefs.

To be sure, we're all guilty of deliberate ignorance at time.  In my case, for example, there's a tendency to put off medical tests.

Or use one of those handy online calculators to find out how much I should have saved up in order to live out my golden years in comfort.

Or step onto my bathroom scale.

But - at least when it comes to the great issues confronting my nation and my planet - I try to avoid ignorance.  And I find that, as I get older, I have less and less patience with those who choose to walk in darkness with respect to such things.

One of these great issues is global climate change.  To my mind, it will be the biggest challenge confronting America - and humanity - in this century. 

I didn't always believe that.  I didn't want to.  My personal and intellectual bent is to think in terms of human progress - the spread of freedom, constitutionalism, education, opportunity, and tolerance to more and more of humanity.

And space travel, of course. 

It goes against the grain to think that the great challenge of my lifetime will not involve spreading enlightenment and landing on Mars - but hunkering down to avoid human extinction.

But over time, I've learned too much to deny the threat of climate change.  I'm worried.  I think we should all be worried.

And I'm getting seriously annoyed with those strident know-nothings who insist that global climate change is a hoax, or part of a natural cycle, or something to do with sunspots. 

Now, here's the moment where I could say some pretty harsh things about climate change deniers.  The temptation is great.

But I started this column with Isaiah, not Jeremiah - so let's take a different tack.

Because the fact is that climate change deniers are not really the problem.  They're a vocal, but ever-so-slowly dwindling, minority in this country. 

In a study or public opinion released by Yale and George Mason universities - "Global Warming's Six Americas" - the two groups labeled "Dismissive" and "Doubtful" make up only 10% and 15% of the American population, respectively. 

And that's not nearly enough to stop America from taking serious action - if the rest of us are determined to do so.

On climate change, the key group - as always - are the undecideds.  The Yale/GMU study labeled this group "Cautious".  These folks - a whopping 29% - are the ones who really matter in the climate change debate.

Convince them, and the doubters and deniers are marginalized.  Fail to convince them, and nothing much gets done. 

So rather than lash the deniers, let me instead appeal to those on my side of the issue - the "Alarmed" and "Concerned" who make up 13 and 26% of the population, respectively. 

We're the ones who're pretty sure that global climate change is real; that it's serious; that it's the product of human activity; that there's something we can - and must - do about it. 

The problem is that most of us don't really have a firm grasp of the science, or the public policy options available for dealing with the threat.

We need to educate ourselves - and then educate our friends and loved ones who are still "Cautious".  If we do that, the doubters and deniers can go whistle.

This summer, I took a ten-week, college-level on global climate change, taught by two professors from the University of British Columbia.  It was called "Climate Literacy:  Navigating Climate Change Conversations", and it included short lectures, reading materials, interactive workshops, and other good things.

All completely free.

Starting September 30, it will be offered again.  I hope you'll sign up for it.

To be sure, it's a serious undertaking.  It's not hard, but it will require a commitment of three or four hours a week for ten weeks. 

If stick to it, you'll learn a lot.  I urge you sign up - if possible, with a few friends.

From my experience, the one weakness of MOOCs is that they lack direct, human interaction.  If you convince a few friends to take the course - and meet once a week to discuss it over coffee - that problem would be alleviated.

You'd probably learn more, too. 

Climate change is important.

It's time to stop walking in darkness, don't you think?

Is Tehran the Key?

I don't know nearly enough about Iran, but I'm working on it. 

I have picked up a little bit over the years, though, and that little bit tells me that the handful of  experts calling for a rapprochement with Iran are onto something. 

After sixty years of nonsense - on both sides - it's time to build a working partnership with Tehran.

Why?

First, Iran is a power in the Middle East - with or without nuclear weapons - and it's not going to go away.  The reason is that Iran is a real nation. 

What does that mean?

Since the creation of the UN, it has been necessary to pretend that every part of the globe - except for Antarctica - is part of one nation or another.  And it's a fundamental precept of international law that all nations are sovereign equals. 

But that's a legal fiction.  Many so-called "nations" aren't much more than lines on a map.  In much of Africa and the Middle East, national borders are awkward remnants of 19th century European colonialism or post-World War I decisions by the victorious Allied powers.  

These borders don't define real nations.  In many cases, they never will.

Iraq, for example, was created by the British in the early 1920s.  The Brits needed a suitable kingdom for an Arab prince who had been a wartime ally, so they cobbled together three vilayets - provinces - of the defunct Ottoman Empire and called the result Iraq.

Iraq never worked very well.  It only held together into modern times because Saddam Hussein ruled it with an iron fist.  In 2003, when we blundered in and ousted Saddam, the fictitious nation of Iraq began coming apart at the seams. 

We tried holding it together - at the cost of thousands of American and Iraqi lives.  But that was foolish.  Iraq isn't a nation - just lines on a map.

Iran, on the other hand, is real.  Human civilization has existed in Persia for five thousand years.  Despite waves of migration and conquest - specifically including the Islamic conquest in the 7th century - Iran has enjoyed considerable linguistic and cultural continuity over millennia.

It's also a relatively modern society.   In 2012, an Iranian film, A Separation, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  I wish more Americans had seen it.  A Separation had almost nothing to do with politics.  It was a domestic drama about the marital difficulties of a middle-class, urban couple trying to do the best thing for their clever daughter while caring for the husband's father, who was sliding into dementia. 

The remarkable thing about A Separation was how much the people in the film - the couple, the daughter's teachers, the lawyers and judge in their divorce case - resembled urban, middle-class Americans. 

I'm not sure we should be so quick to talk about bombing these people

The great obstacle to understanding between the US and Iran is our long history of mutual bad blood.  Most Iranians would date that bad blood from 1953, when the CIA brought about the overthrow of Iran's popular, constitutionally-elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh's ouster came at the instigation of the Brits, who resented Mosaddegh's nationalization of the British-run Anglo-Persian Oil Company - now BP - which exercised monopoly control of Iran's oil.

America's heavy-handed intervention led to our replacing Britain as the Western power most resented by the Iranian people.  Most Americans paid little attention to this resentment - or even knew it existed - until it boiled over in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when activists seized the US Embassy and held its staff hostage for 444 days.

Those of us alive at the time were outraged by the behavior of the Iranian "students" - and by the failure of its revolutionary government, headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to secure the hostage's prompt release.

At this point, the bad blood became mutual - and it has remained so to this day.

But the question remains:  Should why mistakes the US made during the Eisenhower administration - and mistakes Iran made during the Carter administration - doom our two countries to perpetual animosity?

Iran is a serious country - a real nation with 75 million people, enormous oil reserves, and an advanced nuclear-weapons program.

It is also, as Syria's strongest ally, the potential key to resolving that not-so-real nation's civil war.

Iran is also a potential force for stability in Afghanistan, its neighbor to the east.

Recently, Iran elected a new President - a reasonable fellow named Hassan Rouhani - who replaced the truly dangerous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  President Rouhani has expressed a willingness to negotiate seriously about everything - including nuclear weapons.

Forty years ago, in one of the unlikeliest moves in American diplomatic history, President Richard Nixon - the old Cold Warrior - went to China.  The results of that mission transformed our world forever.

Perhaps it's time for President Obama - winner of a Nobel Peace Prize he has yet to earn - to follow Mr. Nixon's example. 

"No" on ObamaWar

Four years ago, President Obama - newly elected, with majorities in both houses of Congress - and holding a ton of the imaginary currency pundits term "political capital" - passed up a chance to move toward genuine health care reform.  Instead, we got a complex, Rube Goldberg contraption called "Obamacare".

Now, to be sure, Obamacare isn't all bad.  I'd be very much opposed to repealing it.  After all, Obamacare has lowered some folks' insurance bills, at least for a while.  It has allowed many folks with pre-existing conditions to buy insurance.  It has made insurance companies more accountable for how they spend their money.

But there's a lot Obamacare didn't do.  It did nothing serious about reducing medical care or prescription drug costs.  It did nothing at all to increase the supply of doctors - the most obvious step toward both increasing the availability and decreasing the cost of quality care.  It did nothing serious about promoting healthy lifestyles - the single most dramatic step we could take toward cutting the cost of medical care.

Most important, it did nothing to move us toward a single-payer system to replace the embarrassing hodgepodge of conflicting systems which makes America unique - and embarrassingly so - among developed nations.

Obamacare, for all its merits, was basically a can of worms.  With better leadership, and better use of the President's bully pulpit, we could have had a far more progressive, more efficient, less complex law.  Instead, we got a typical, cobbled-together, congressional mess.

Because the new president didn't lead.

Flash forward four years, and we're about to see the same approach taken to war.  With respect to Syria, President Obama - after two years of dithering - has decided, once again, to toss the whole mess to Congress.

And Congress, true to its habits, is beginning to cobble together a complex, Rube Goldberg mechanism to define the conduct of military operations.

And that is something that - as far as I know - has never, ever worked.  Not in all of human history. 

If Congress takes the President up on his invitation to authorize military action against Syria, we're going to get a declaration of something less than war - with a whole lot of restrictions and no clear objective.  And it will solve absolutely nothing.

And I say to hell with it.

But let me be clear as to why. 

I have no problem - none at all - with military operations to depose Bashar al-Assad.  I have no problem with putting him on trial before an international court, or before a court representing a new Syrian government.  Frankly, I have no problem dealing with him as we dealt with Osama bin  Laden - two in the head, two in the heart, and a quick burial at sea.

But that is not what Mr. Obama propose to do.  He proposes some sort of limited, "proportional" response - which essentially means bombing some Syrian military assets.  Some your Syrian soldiers will die.  And some officers.  And probably some unlucky civilians.

Not Assad.  He's supposed to get the "message".

But what's the message?  To obey international law on the subject of chemical warfare? 

Assuming there is such a law, wouldn't that be better done by an international organization - maybe a court, with due process - not the United States and a few allies acting on their own, like some sort of international lynch mob?

Honestly, it's time we outgrew the notion that bombs are some sort of messaging system.  It isn't a way to enforce laws.  And it certainly isn't a way to build a nation.

The purpose of war isn't to communicate, it's to defeat someone - to conquer them and impose your will on them. 

War is a blunt instrument.  And it tends to run out of control - no matter how many pre-conditions you try to write into your plans.

That being so, our Founding Fathers made it clear that they wanted Congress - and only Congress - to have the awesome responsibility of declaring war.  But they did not say that Congress should conduct the war.  That was left to the Commander in Chief.

The Founders, as men of experience and good sense, knew that declaring war is a very big deal - the release of uncontrollable forces which could lead to triumph or disaster.  Only a cautious, bicameral legislative body should decide to commit the country to war.

Only a single individual could then decide how to wage it.

Obviously, we're not doing that.  We're going to pretend that a legislative body can design a compromise war - in the process, handcuffing the President who will then have to conduct it.

So we're going at this all wrong.  The Founders told us how to do it, and we're ignoring everything they said.

Here's what we should do:

The President should go to Congress - not with a few, limited things he plans to do and a lot of promises about what he won't allow to happen - but with a clear, military goal. 

And in this case, the only possible clear goal is the elimination of the Assad regime and - perhaps - the seizure of its chemical weapons stocks. 

That's a military goal.  That's a war goal.

It would, of course, take more than a stand-off attack with cruise missiles.  It would require "boots on the ground".  Men and women would die.  But that's what armies and navies and air forces are for - to engage and destroy an enemy.  The necessary concomitant of that is that some of your own men and women will die. 

But in a war, they're at least dying for something concrete - not so send a message.

But that's not what the President has called for - not what Congress is going to determine.  

They're going to design some legislative compromise, and pretend it means something.

Four years ago, they gave us Obamacare.

Now, we get ObamaWar.

What Now? (Part Two)

In my previous post, I suggested that there were four ways in which Congress could respond to President Obama's request for their endorsement of action against Syria. 

They could say Yes.

They could say No.

They could ask for a more detailed plan, with serious undertakings as to the President's further plans in the event that bombing Syria doesn't result in its abandonment of chemical weapons.

They could declare war against Syria, insisting upon a full-scale military effort to oust the Assad regime, corral Syria's stockpiles of WMD, and pull out.

Obviously, the first two options are what they are.  If Congress says "Yes", they must hope that this President - not the most decisive or experienced of presidents - will be able to avoid the slippery slope which seems, too often, to lead from limited intervention into invasion, protracted conflict, and a failed attempt at nation-building.

If Congress says "No", apparently, that's it.  We stay out, and let what happens, happen.

If Congress asks for a more detailed strategy - and the President complies - Congress will then be left to decide whether to say yes or no to that plan.  Which doesn't really change anything, since plans are just plans - and the slippery slope still looms.

Which brings us to option four:  What if Congress upped the ante by insisting that we go all-in?  What if we just declared war - essentially giving the bird to Vladimir Putin, Iran's ayatollahs and China's new mandarins of  - and started landing the Marines?

I'm not recommending it, understand, but there's something to be said for waging war in pursuit of a decisive result.

Indeed, there was a great deal to be said for it two years ago, when we dithered around hoping an ill-sorted, disorganized bunch of rebels would be able to topple a well-organized, ruthless regime fighting for the existence of itself and the religious minority it leads.

At that point, there was at least some prospect that a quick, decisive victory would leave in place the sort of civil society necessary as the prerequisite for nation-building. 

Now, all the people we could have relied upon then - the educated, relatively secular businessmen, lawyers, doctors, teachers and bureaucrats who are the best hope in every society seeking to move toward enlightened self-government - are either dead or fled.  Of the millions of Syrians now in exile, it's a safe bet that their number includes nearly everyone who could afford to get out.

And that number will include nearly everyone in Syria who doesn't believe, deep down, that it is the will of Allah that his particular group crush, humiliate, and rule over all the other groups.  

Which is to say that - while there might possibly have been a good ending to the Syrian rising had we acted promptly and decisively to eliminate Assad - there is no good ending possible now.  No matter who wins, Syria will be devastated for decades - and the eventual ruler will be the survivor of a particularly ruthless war of all against all.

Speaking personally, had I been President two years ago - and had the military been able to put together a plan which involved limited costs - I would have taken advantage of the opportunity to eliminate the Assad regime.  Period. 

There are a lot of bad rulers in the world - many of them hostile to the United States.  Most of the time, we have to live with that.

But when there's a chance to support a group of people who are making a serious effort to topple one of them - and there's a reasonable chance of succeeding - my instinct is to take it. 

But again, that was two years ago. 

And my guess is that the President's present desire to do something arises largely out of the desire to compensate for the mistake he made in not doing something then.

There's a good deal of that in recent American foreign policy.  We miss an opportunity, and later, we try to go back for a redo.

Like the urgency of a bunch of retreads from Bush 41 talking his son into invading Iraq after 9-11 - on a fabricated pretext - in order to make up for their failure to finish off Saddam ten years earlier.

They missed that chance.  The attempt to get it back was a waste of lives and treasure - and a profound distraction from the  mission of catching Osama bin Laden.

At any rate, that's my sense of what's going on here.  A lot of people in Washington - including the President - are having regrets about missing the boat in 2011.  But they did miss the boat, and it's now too late to go back and fix things.  Syria's educated middle-class is gone.  There's no one left to build a nation with.

Which leaves the American people - now that we've been belated invited into this debate - to make the best of our remaining options.

And they are two:

Either stay out - completely out - and let Syria gone on destroying itself.  Perhaps by focusing on something a lot more important - and about which we  could actually do something - like global climate change.

Or go in - hard and fast, boots on the ground - to take out Assad and his military, capture his chemical weapons stocks, and leave. 

And then let the Syrians go on killing each other until someone forms a new government.  Or several new governments.

For my money, since there are al Qaeda and Hezbollah fighters on the ground in Syria, I'd vote for the limited incursion to decapitate the Assad regime and grab the weapons.  If our military thinks that's possible.

If not, I'd vote to stay out completely and just stop talking about it. 

Because the bottom line is this: 

Two years ago, we had a magnificence, once-in-a-presidency chance to topple a truly evil regime and allow a relatively educated, sophisticated people to try for something better.

And we missed the  boat.

Since we can't turn back the clock, we shouldn't waste any more time with it.  If we can grab Assad's weapons at a reasonable cost, let's go.

If not, let's go home.

What Now? (Part One)

President Obama has taken Washington by surprise by requesting Congressional support prior to taking military action against Syria.

To be sure, like all modern presidents, Mr. Obama maintains that he has the necessary authority to act without Congressional approval.  Nonetheless, he's asking Congress to back him up, for some reason.

We should probably leave it there.  The President's justification for inviting Congressional backup has been - like almost every aspect of his approach to Syria - a bewildering muddle of inconsistent arguments.  One of the advantages of having a magnificent speaking voice is that you don't have to make a logical argument to sound persuasive.

Let's just say this:  The President's sudden decision to include Congress in the process came on the heels of Prime Minister David Cameron's inviting Britain's House of Commons to vote on his proposal to join the US in taking military action - and the Commons' stunning rejection of such action.

And again, I have to stop myself from going on.  Speculating about what the President  is thinking is just such a tempting topic.  And we're going to be hearing a lot about it from our personality and process obsessed media.

Professors and pundits will be dissecting the President's decision in terms of its  political and constitutional aspects.  Did this decision arise from presidential weakness - or strength?  Is it the product of crafty political calculation - or a wimpy desire to avoid a difficult decision?  Does it represent a shift of power from the White House to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue - or a nifty maneuver to regain the initiative from Congress?

These are all interesting questions, but they aren't immediately important.  What's immediately important is that, between now and when Congress reassembles on September 9, we - the People - might actually have a chance to determine what our country does about one important issue.

Because, whatever his motives, when Mr. Obama asked Congress to vote on his military plans, he also invited the American people to let Congress know what we want. 

And this is a rare opportunity.

We live in an era in which the will of the people is almost irrelevant.  Congressional districts are gerrymandered in such a way that a great majority of Representatives come from single-party districts.  As a result, most members of the House are extremists - hyper-partisan Democrats or Republicans who have no interest in compromise.  Yet this comes at a time when the largest part of the American population - around 40% - rejects both parties.  A time at which somewhat less than 10% of the American people approves of Congress.

With Congress thus disconnected from the people it supposedly represents, the President has tossed out a major policy question on which neither party has a clear position. 

It's almost unprecedented, but the question of taking military action against Syria is simply not one of those issues in which there is a clear-cut Democratic or Republican policy.  

Everyone assumed that the President would be making this decision himself, so the default Republican position was to condemn the President if anything went wrong - and the default Democratic position was to defend him.

No one in Congress expected actually to have to make a decision.

To be sure, some members of each party have been outspoken - but they have been outspokenly on both sides of the issue. 

With Syria suddenly at the top of the Congressional agenda, it seems unlikely that either party will be able to work as a unit.  The leaders can't be sure whom they are leading.  The whips can't be sure whipping will work.

Legislative gridlock has been replaced by a strange situation in which everything is in the hotchpot.

Which means that letters, calls and emails from the voters - perhaps even crowds of people in the streets - might actually make the difference here.

Remember what  just happened in Britain.

For the next two weeks, if we want it, the American people will have the chance to decide a matter of real importance through a process approaching actual democracy.

So - what shall we do?

There are, it would appear, four basic options.

First, obviously, Congress could give the President what he is asking for - an endorsement of limited military action against the Syrian government.

Second, it could refuse that endorsement - presumably ending the prospect of American involvement in the Syrian civil war.

Third, it could ask the President for a more detailed plan - perhaps with restrictions to avoid the escalation of an aerial campaign into another full-scale, boots-on-the-ground war.

Finally, Congress could do what almost no one is talking about:  It could declare war on Syria, with the specific intention of ending the Assad regime and confiscating or destroying all of Syria's weapons of mass destruction.

Each of these options has advantages - and all are worthy of discussion.

But the bottom line is this:  The decision as to what we do - or don't do - in Syria is now in our hands.  We can sit back and speculate about what's going on in Washington - or we can demand that our Senators and Representatives listen to us.

Whatever we decide, this should be our decision.  This time - right now - Washington should be listening to us.

The Challenge of the MOOC

It is hardly original to observe that we live in the Information Age, or that the internet appears to be changing everything.

Which makes it all the more surprising that one reads so little about how our colleges and universities are preparing for the advent of the massive, open, online course - the  MOOC.

Considering how few of my well-informed friends know anything about MOOCs, I'm not exactly sure how I stumbled upon them.  Perhaps the word simply got lost in the flood of information in which we are all daily immersed.  Or perhaps, having been a public school teacher and administrator, the news hit me close to where I have lived.

At any rate, when I started hearing about MOOCs, I knew I'd have to do some personal research.  So this May, I enrolled in a ten-week course on Global Climate Change through Coursera.org - the largest of three consortia offering college level instruction, online, for free.

Having completed this course - I chose the MOOC equivalent of auditing - I can pronounce myself impressed.  The course was taught by two engaging professors from the University of British Columbia, Dr. Sara Harris and Dr. Sarah Burch.  They offered online lectures as well as substantial reading assignments, interactive "labs", weekly quizzes, and stimulating discussion groups in the form of comment threads.

For those who preferred to earn a certificate, there were two assigned papers and a comprehensive final exam.  And a fee of $39.

That's not a typo.  $39.

Thousands of students, from all over the planet, signed up for this MOOC.  Around 1900 of us audited the course all the way to the end, while another 750 earned the certificate. 

I learned a lot - as I'm certain most of my fellow students did.

To be sure, I've taken more demanding courses.  But I've also taken courses - both undergraduate and graduate - which were considerably easier.  In other words, this MOOC offered a genuine educational experience, comparable in difficulty to a typical undergraduate course.

The MOOC represents a new thing under the sun.  At a time when individuals, families, and governments are groaning under the weight of ever-mounting college costs - too often for instruction of doubtful quality - it would be remarkable if the MOOC didn't find a valued place within the educational marketplace.

Thus far, the three consortia offering MOOCs have focused on recruiting outstanding teachers from many of the world's top universities.  Coursera, which started at Stanford, offers courses from, among other schools, Harvard, MIT, UVA and Oxford.

Moreover, while most MOOCs are not yet accorded college credit, that door has begun to open.  In February, the American Council on Education (ACE) announced that five MOOCs - two math courses from UCal-Irvine, two biology courses from Duke, and a calculus course from the UPenn - qualified for college credit.

ACE's decision is the foot in the door.  It seems inevitable that - given today's competitive economy - large employers will soon begin devising ways of assessing the actual knowledge and skills of potential employees, rather than contenting themselves with mere paper transcripts. 

In time, assessing actual knowledge and skills - instead of transcripts - will provide an opportunity for a new category of entrepreneurs - and pink slips for a lot of HR drones.

More to the point, corporate and other employers - as well as the self-employed - will almost certainly take advantage of MOOCs as a means of upgrading the skills and knowledge of current employees - at little or no cost.

In time, even state licensing agencies - such as those which supervise costly and burdensome continuing ed programs - will have to get on board.

In the long run, MOOCs seem certain to shake traditional institutions of higher learning to their foundations.

When world-class teachers, from world-class universities, are available at little or no cost, how much longer can society be expected to continuing paying tens of thousands of dollars per student, per year for college instruction which is often mediocre and subject to grade inflation, and which, in the end, offers no proof of actual knowledge?

Would it not be more effective, and far less costly, to develop sophisticated means of assessing knowledge and skills - and allow individuals in need of new knowledge to acquire it by any available means?

Yet, if low-cost, self-directed education becomes an acceptable alternative to traditional university education, why wouldn't MOOCs run most bricks-and-mortar colleges out of business?

In some cases, the answer is - almost certainly - that they will.  Not every college or university will prove sufficiently adaptable to adjust to the rise of high-quality, free, online education.

Yet others will - quite possibly by meeting the challenge of the modern with the wisdom of tradition.    

In Britain's Oxford and Cambridge, the prevailing model of undergraduate education involves face-to-face meetings between one scholar and from one to three students.  No method of teaching is remotely as effective as this intimate, face-to-face, tutorial approach.

Up until now, the labor-intensive tutorial model has been ill-suited to American universities, committed as they are to educating enormous numbers of young people.

The rise of online education - with its ability to deliver high-quality, basic instruction to virtually unlimited numbers of students - might solve this problem.  Perhaps - in the near future - the American university will be able to use online lectures, peer-led discussion groups, and peer evaluation of research to free up instructional time for one-on-one, tutorial instruction.

In future, the choice might not be the  modern or the traditional, but a marriage of the best of both.

____________

Coursera's "Climate Literacy:  Navigating Climate Change Conversations" will be offered in a new session starting September 30.

Politics 101

Though he now seems likely to be distracted by the mess in Syria - the consequence of several  years of principled procrastination - President Obama has spent much of August on a strategically-timed campaign aimed at the problem of soaring college education costs.

I use the word "campaign" because - as is typical with political campaigns - the President was far more specific about describing the problem than he was about solving it.

Being the month when students prepare to return to campus - and when new freshmen begin their undergraduate lives - August provided an ideal opportunity for the President to hit the trail, campaign style, deploring rising college costs.

Campaigning 101, you might say.

This makes sense for an administration which never really evolved beyond the campaign - and, thus, is more comfortable pointing out problems than fixing them.  The President picked a time when college costs - including the many hidden costs which coincide with the fully-packed SUV, parental tears, and the awkward last hugs of that first trip to campus - are very much on the minds of American families. 

The veteran campaigners on Mr. Obama's staff arranged a series of rallies at which he could talk to large, star-struck crowds of college kids - or high school kids preparing to apply to colleges - about wanting to reduce these costs.

It really didn't matter that the President had no credible plan. 

And it certainly didn't matter that there's a logical inconsistency between the President's goal of making college education available to even more young Americans - while simultaneously trying to rein in rising costs.

Which, of course, amounts to saying, "Let's increase demand and bring the costs down at the same time.

That might get high marks in Campaigning 101, but not in Economics 101.

Still, it would be wrong to come down too hard on this President.  America's approach to what we quaintly term "higher education" has been unrealistic for decades now - since Vietnam, really - under both Republicans and Democrats.

Regardless of which party is in power, the policy has been to subsidize college education for ever-growing numbers of young people.

Why?

That brings us to Politics 101.

First, obviously, middle-class and working-class parents are dead serious about sending their kids to college - and they're grateful to any politician willing to help them pay the resulting bills.

That's why state governments provide financial assistance - largely in the form of discount "in-state" tuition rates and tax-free education savings plans.  Both are ways of buying middle-class and working-class votes with the voters' own money. 

That's also why Congress keeps expanding the Federal government's out-of-control policy of lending money, at low interest, to anyone who manages to finagle getting into college.

But it's not just parents who love financial aid programs.  Even more important are the kids themselves. 

Most newly-minted college freshmen are eighteen-year-olds - which is to say, they are also brand-new voters with no established party loyalties.

And, just like automobile manufacturers and brewers of malt beverages, political parties know that a brand loyalty established in the late teens will likely endure for decades, if not a lifetime.

What better way to win the hearts and votes of young Americans than by helping them pay for college now?

And, if their loyalties falter over the years, what better way to regain them than by passing a series of "fix-it" bills holding down interest rates - or forgiving part of their student loans?

Oldest trick in the book.

Politics 101.

Plus, there's this additional advantage to tuition assistance and college loan programs.  They introduce young voters - in a big way - to the grand American tradition of spending now and paying later. 

Again, that's an old, time-honored bipartisan tradition.  Buy now, pay later is how Democrats fund social programs.

It's how Republicans finance tax cuts for the rich.

It's how both parties buy the support of the real estate and housing industries.

It's how both parties finance their wars.

Really, it's how both parties - and the whole American business and political establishment -  rationalize our continuing failure to address global climate change.

Pollute now, pay later.

And it's why the United States - which used to profit by being the world's biggest lender - has gradually transformed itself into the world's biggest borrower.

Our college loan programs are an ideal way of acquainting yet another generation of young Americans with the seductive logic of deficit finance.

But, of course, this sort of thing can't go on forever.

The hard reality is that we spend too much money sending too many eighteen-year-olds to college. 

Indeed, because we make loans available to anyone who gets into college - for as long as they stay in college - we're subsidizing a lot of bad decisions by young people who aren't yet serious about learning

While raising the demand - and thus, the costs - for those students who are.