Day 15

The UPTE walkout is a real strike. According to Berkeley's human resources website, it will be an illegal strike. The HR office has put information on its website that includes answers about the consequences of participating in the strike, and union member's rights and responsibilities. Pay will be docked and benefits such as vacation time will not be accrued for employees who decide to participate. I am very disappointed to report that I will be on legitimate vacation next week, and will not have the privilege of choosing whether or not to cross the picket lines. Therefore, my benefits will continue to accrue as normal. Phew!

A colleague of mine is participating in a year-long leadership course. She's also recently completed mediation training, and taken a day-long class on project management. Sounds like career training for a back up plan to me. I am anxious to chat with others on campus to see if they are taking similar actions. I've thought about enrolling in courses to improve my statistics and sophisticated computer skills for the same reasons. Sounds like a good plan for us all. Now, will Berkeley be able to/choose to capitalize on all of our newly improved skills, or are we all preparing to take our skills elsewhere?

One of my most loyal readers brought my attention to the current conversation about online education, and the fact that universities face something resembling extinction if they don't participate. Online education provides versatility to non-traditional students who don't have as much flexibility to participate on a physical campus, and allows faculty and students to take advantage of a variety of technologies in the virtual classroom. But the most important benefit in our current climate is about the money. Online courses can save money for the university while bringing in more students, which means more tuition money. The cost per student decreases when facilities management is removed from the equation. Of course, the startup costs for the technology required for online teaching and learning are nothing to sneeze at, and are themselves barriers to access for students and even for institutions without enough capital to get things started. That said, many colleges and universities have already added online learning concepts to their reportoire. You can practically get an MIT education for free with their open courseware philosophy and materials. Berkeley currently offers video and/or audio of most of it's classroom courses as podcasts to students who can't, um, make it to class on any given day, which is a version of online education. Last July, a Berkeley dean wrote an oped for the LA times suggesting UC open an 11th campus, a campus located entirely online. I'm afraid I can't see how a new campus would be a good idea financially when each of the current campuses could serve the online community at much lower startup and administrative cost, but what do I know? Conceptually changing how things are done at a university can notoriously be like trying to move a mountain with a toothpick. But American universities have historically changed with the times when they had no other choice. Harvard is over 300 years old, but hardly resembles the institution it started as, and in many ways, has quite a different look than the Harvard of 1950. Just a few generations ago, only rich white boys from prominent families could go to college and would study greek and latin and mathematics. Ivy leagues only began admitting women in the sixties and seventies. On the technology side, as an undergraduate, we barely had overhead projectors. A few years later as a graduate student, most every one of my classrooms was equipped with some combination of laptop, projector, soundsystem, and internet and phone connections for remote lectures, meetings, and conference calls. Things can and will change. I'm a believer in progress, and I'm a believer in tradition. I have confidence that the institutions that belong in our future will adapt--maintaining tradition while providing for modern needs--and be here for centuries to come. This is one of the primary reasons why it is so important for the state of California and the UC system to think about how we can still exist and be viable 200 years from now in the same conversations in which they discuss our 2010-2011 fiscal budgets.

As I mentioned earlier, I'll be on vacation part of next week. I can't really afford it. I don't care. A person has to continue to live.