Category Archives: Policy & Politics
The Gated Academy
I was walking past the gates on my campus this morning and noticed them in a way I hadn’t before. Like at many universities, they are symbolic, and intended to represent the opening up of knowledge and–particularly for our campus, which serves a large number of first-generation university students–of opportunity. But today, I wondered about […]
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Garage Universities
I am wary of playing too much into the Silicon Valley myth, and nothing can be more central to that myth than the garage start-up. Nonetheless, the idea of a “university start-up” seems almost unfathomable, outside the less-than-interesting world of for-profit universities. I may want to buy a Tesla (automobile start-ups probably pre-date the Silicon […]
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Reheeling
There lived on Actinuria a young inventor by the name of Pyron, who learned to pull wires out of platinum so thin, you could make nets with them for catching clouds. Pyron invented the wire telegraph, and then he pulled the wire out so fine, it wasn’t there, and in this fashion he obtained the […]
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Pandemic: The Return