The Solar Impulse stopped in our neighborhood this week and is off to continue its trip around the world. It was stuck here for five days because it was too windy for this absurd, delicate, folly to fly safely, but things have calmed down and it’s ready to resume its 30 mph odyssey. I think […]
Michael O'Hare
Michael O'Hare is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Posted inEducation
Cal-Berkeley Athletics Update
It’s hard to imagine Berkeley’s public presence degrading below the state our sexual harassment episodes have brought us to, but we have been doing a job on ourselves in intercollegiate athletics as well. Today’s news has a twofer, a sexual assault accusation with a sports angle. Sigh. The football and men’s basketball teams’ academic performance […]
Posted inEconomy
Open Letter to the Class of 2020
The following letter (lightly edited for this reissue) was posted in late 2010 (many comments there, worth a read). In the last several weeks, I’ve been asked by a variety of friends and colleagues to post it again. I wish I could report that it’s out of date, but the trends it discusses have worsened […]
Posted inPolitics
Don’t Believe the Met is in Financial Crisis
Robin Pogrebin raises the alarm: the Met is cutting staff and putting off building plans! Look for cutbacks on the art side, “staff reductions [and] reduced programming”, and more effort on the not-much-to-do-with-art side, “a concerted effort to increase revenue in its restaurants and retail operations”. The deficit forcing these painful compromises is really scary, […]
Posted inEducation
Why Is It So Hard to Increase Learning?
The single most important obstacle to improving student learning in college (I don’t know enough about K-12) is our terrier-like obsession with assessment and our faith in punishment and reward as the only motivators of any use. It’s all summative evaluation, that does nothing for performance because it’s delivered too late and in an affectively […]
Posted inEducation
Sexual Harassment at Berkeley, cont.
Berkeley’s miserable sequence of sexual harassment cases continues: this week it embarrassed our men’s basketball team, as we fired an assistant coach for abusing a reporter in an episode that included a kidnapping and threats to damage her career — the day we were accepted into the national tournament with a very flattering #4 seed. […]
Posted inEducation
Academic Misogyny: Enabling at High Levels
Among the regrettable contributions of my institution to a national conversation about sex and gender in the workplace are two recent WTF?? black eyes. Last fall we learned of a Nobel-Prize-short-list astronomer trashing his career, and his female students’, while his colleagues enabled him over a decade. I ended that post with The chancellor and […]
Posted inPolitics
Rick Snyder, Republican Hero
Thirty years ago [sic], I was visiting the drinking water treatment plant of Cambridge, Mass, and noticed a wonderful little Rube Goldberg contraption that dribbled a white powder onto a small turntable, from which an oscillating arm with a little scraper attached pushed intermittent tablespoonsful into the water flowing past in a flume underneath. “What’s […]
Posted inPolitics
The California Budget
Governor Brown’s budget increases education spending (K-12 and higher education both) by less than two percent, (less than half what he proposes to dump into the prison-industrial corrections enterprise) after decades of starving them, but socks two billion into the rainy day fund under the mattress. Saving for bad times is good, but so is […]
Posted inPolitics
An Integrated Registry of Real Hazards
Donald Trump has the attention span of a gnat, so it’s not surprising he forgot what he meant about the registry of Moslems. The other Republicans are flailing about trying to find a coherent system for protecting Americans, but most of them have been irretrievably stupefied by years on a public payroll and lack any […]
