regulatory requirements

from the Provost's memo:

Beginning with the Fall 2012 semester, faculty or graduate students teaching General  Education courses  must include  the General  Education  student  learning  outcomes  in their syllabi  for the General Education categories  which their courses meet.

This  is  necessary   for  the   university   to  be  in  compliance   with   regulatory   and   reporting requirements, including Middle States accreditation standards.

here are the learning outcomes for 'H' and 'C' courses:

H requirement - Humanities

Students in H courses will demonstrate an understanding of human experience though the study of literature or philosophy.

C requirement - Composition

Students in C courses will demonstrate

1.     The ability to write effectively and coherently, in ways appropriate to the discipline and the level of the course.

2.     The ability to revise and improve their writing in both form and content.

Kim Kierkegaardashian

link: here

holy shit

that's a student/faculty ratio of about 1600:1, right?

Perhaps the biggest problem was the company was just growing really, really fast. Ashford now has 90,000 students. It had about 10,000 in 2007. How was it doing that?

Part of the way it did this, and part of the reason Western Association of Schools and Colleges seems to have denied the institution its seal of approval, had to do with its staffing.

According to the article, Ashford employed only 56 full-time faculty members in 2011. The institution had only 14 writing specialists and 38 instructional specialists for those tens of thousands of students. Oddly, however, the institution had 2,305 staff members in “enrollment services.” That means the people in charge of finding and recruiting people to attend this open-enrollment school.

source: here

graphing philosophy

a graph of the influences among philosophers as indicated by wikipedia

link: here

h/t: philos-l

Schopenhauer in the world

from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, p. 257

IN THEIR SEARCH of the Eldert Street apartment, Brooklyn police officers found several books with Mrs. Gross’s name on the flyleaf. They were medical books, with information on different poisons. The last was philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, which despairingly contends that, at core, the universe offers no hope of a rational existence.

Geoghan, the district attorney, first dismissed the books as unimportant, but then neighbors filed in with stories about Mrs. Gross. A woman who lived two doors down made and filed a statement about a conversation she’d had several weeks before the chain of deaths began. Mrs. Gross – after learning that she was pregnant again – had said that she intended to kill her children, her mother, and herself with rat poison.

actually, one thing to post about

congratulations to Andres Molina, for successfully defending his dissertation, "On How Law Determines Morality"

yay!

hey it's summer

not much to post on