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.

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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.