In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford, began teaching a class. Part of it was in person. Part of it was online. The online portion had over 160,000 students. Some of them did better than the students who took the class in person. Out of this single data point, a legend was born. What grew up in the twelve or so months after this even was a sight to behold. Thrun left Stanford to
Thirty years ago last week, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (now Universities Canada) published a wholly remarkable document entitled The Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian University Education (I can’t find an online edition but here’s a contemporary account from Maclean’s). Since the Commission was just one man – Stuart Smith – its public moniker was usually “The Smith Commission”. It was a remarkable document in so many ways so there’s more than enough reason to go down the memory lane
Agriculture faculties often sit oddly within the modern university. I mean this literally in the sense that they are usually off at one end of campus or in some cases several tens of kilometres away from it. Despite strong roots (heh) in the biological sciences, they get treated as separate entities for reasons that aren’t really evident from a scientific point of view. The rough analogy from the physical sciences is computer science, which, like agriculture, has a pretty high
Let’s talk about Ryerson and McGill. In brief: McGill University is named after James McGill, a Montreal fur-trader and farmer. He was not a particularly notable figure in life, but after his death in 1813 he left a reasonably large bequest, including most of the land on which the downtown campus now sits, to start a college. He also over the course of his life owned five slaves (three Black, two Indigenous). In brief: Ryerson University is named for Egerton
For the last couple of weeks, I have been plowing through three books on universities and their built environments: Paul Venable Turner’s classic tome Campus: An American Planning Tradition, two recent works on universities and cities: Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century by LaDale C. Winling, and In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin, both dealing primarily with urban universities in the United States (though the latter has some
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