To quote another another commentator today:

The Crimson has an op-ed on simultaneous enrollment that I agree with.

(That's Michael Mitzenmacher, blogging at his own My Biased Coin, whose own op-ed in response is also worth reading.)

I'll let Prof. Mitz do the explaining-of-background:

Harvard does not like simultaneous enrollment, which means a student taking two classes that meet at the same time -- any time overlap counts (whether the whole class or half an hour once a week). If you want to take a class via simultaneous enrollment, you have to petition the Administrative Board, and your professor is supposed to provide direct hour-per-hour instruction for the class you can't intend. As a previous Crimson article states:

The Faculty Handbook requires that "direct and personal compensatory instruction" for simultaneous enrollment, but only recently has the Ad Board refused to recognize videotaped lectures as a stand-in for class time.

The article references that for the past several years the Ad Board has accepted recorded lectures, under some additional conditions, as a suitable proxy for the direct and personal compensatory instruction. This apparently represented a change from their past position, and this last year, while I was on sabbatical, some Standing Committee on Education Policy decided to push back and say no more recorded substitutions.

Okay, so now it's a College requirement for every course that students pretend to be busy for three fixed hours every week, whether or not they choose to be physically in class. Never mind that students at the Extension School can earn credit towards their degrees for doing literally the same thing College students are now not allowed to do.

And if professors want

1

It's shopping week at Harvard. Study cards aren't due until next week, so students have a week free to test-drive classes, skip class entirely, or just mess around.

Wednesday, I was just messing around. Finding myself with no afternoon classes to shop, I instead dropped into the first lecture of Computer Science 50.

CS50 is...well, it's difficult to explain. Any year now, it's going to pass Economics 10 as the largest class at Harvard. It's almost singlehandedly responsible for a tripling in the size of the CS department in the last five years. It's what happens when you give one of the best lecturers in the world a multi-million dollar operating budget and the mission to teach a class, not just for Harvard students, but for anyone in the world who wants to learn. CS50 is an experience. CS50 is what the future of what internet-age education will (or at least should) look like.

The course comes with its own dance-beat-fueled teaser-trailer:

and all of last year's lectures are online for free, if that's a thing you think is cool.

Speaking of legendary lecturers and things online for free, I hadn't realized that The Feynman Lectures on Physics were offered free-to-read online. Speaking as someone who once studied the subject, but gave up when I found more interesting things to do, I still think that figuring out how everything works is really, jaw-droppingly cool, and Dick Feynman is, by all accounts, a wonderful teacher.

Certainly, from what of his I've read, I've found he

In what I promise is the last Excellent Sheep-related thing I'll link to this month, here's an excellent two-sided discussion between Harry Lewis and Bill Deresiewicz on excellence, souls, sheep, and related things in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Both sides make excellent points, though perhaps it's no surprise which I think comes out on top. Excerpt from Lewis:

"'Excellence' appears, in different forms, in the titles of both our books. I meant it in a positive sense; I think American universities produce excellent results, in both people and ideas. On the human side it’s an incomplete form of excellence -- not enough arete -- but the research university is the greatest structure ever created for free thought, discovery, and creation. The competition for excellence drives that engine, for all the pathological side effects we both describe. Undergraduates can and do join that process at a high level while they are still young enough to have their eyes opened.

But you write to college students: 'You want

First, to wrap up our interlude of other people's insights, a zinger from one of my favorite professors ever, Dr. Margo Seltzer:

If I had as much disdain for my students as Deresiewicz appears to have for his, I'd get a new job. Seriously -- I view my students so differently from the way he does that it's hard to imagine we teach at similar institutions, and yet we do.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled...

Dear brother,

I haven't said much about my actual experience here, have I? Most of it's been the sort of broad descriptions you could have gleaned by just looking in from the outside; what's it like to actually live there, you ask? I'm glad you did.

Let's start with the people. Here are a few snapshots of my friends, in no particular order:

Sorry, friends; my jet lag (from returning from Hong Kong on Saturday), seems to have finally caught up with me. Part 3 proper is probably going to have to wait a day, since I went to sleep last night instead of writing it. To tide you over, here are a few excerpts from around the internet:

I'm a Laborer's Son. I Went to Yale. I Am Not "Trapped in a Bubble of Privilege." by Andrew Giambrone, Yale grad now writing for The Atlantic, on the New Republic:

First, his argument effaces important economic, social, and personal differences among students, conveniently neglecting the fact that elite colleges allow athletes and engineers to sit around the same seminar tables as sons of farmers and daughters of CEOs. Second, his turgid derision of elite schools risks dissuading lower- and middle-class kids like myself from applying to those very same institutions.

The Ivy League Is Not the Problem by Osita Nwanevu, U. Chicago student, on Slate:

Deresiewicz says that a campus environment is a rare venue where people from different social strata can interact “on an equal footing.” But having them eat the same processed cafeteria foods and doze off in the same introductory lectures will not put the privileged and the underprivileged on an equal footing. Whether they’re under a publicly financed roof or not, these sorts of interactions are shaped by our past experiences. There will always be a divide between the upper-middle-class student who chooses to attend a public college and the poor student who must. There will

Dear brother,

Yesterday, we talked about the (for some) counterintuitive fact that an elite education isn't just for those with elite pocketbooks. (Fun fact: for 90% of students, Harvard is cheaper than state school.) Today, we're grappling with something a bit more meaty.

Deresiewicz's swipe at the financial cost of an Ivy education is delivered offhand, but his critiques of Ivy League admissions policy are full-throated. We, he alleges, were admitted not because we demonstrated true passions and talents or showed any real promise as peers and fellow-students-to-be, but merely because we were "manufactured" to be "fit to compete in the college admissions game."

Well, to borrow a phrase, "it almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard" attract truly talented students. What, an admissions committee with basically free choice of the nation's graduating seniors, some of the business's most talented officers, more than a few decades experience, and a year-round mission to see through the ploys of Ivy-at-all-costs parents to the true character of applicants...is just going to fail at their single job? Paint me skeptical.

To the contrary, I'm sure Mr. Deresiewicz would be ecstatic to hear that writing an essay about your all-expenses-paid service trip to Guatemala is a really easy way to get your application canned; if instead you wrote about "waiting tables so that you can see [that] you really aren’t as smart as everyone has been telling you," you'd have a much better shot at convincing the committee that you're

Dear brother,

Congratulations on making it through three years of that purgatory called high school! Soon you'll be getting up close and personal with that great Millenial coming-of-age ritual: the one where you and a few dozen people you've never met conspire to decide what sort of weather and dining hall food you'll be enjoying (or cursing) for four years of your life.

You're going to get a lot of advice on how to navigate the next year or so. Unfortunately, not all of it will be good. One day, I'll try to organize my own thoughts on the matter, but today, I feel compelled to rebut a refrain I've heard echoed far too often recently.

The fundamental complaint is that "elite" education (for some definition) leaves students with empty credentials at the expense of true learning, and that graduating high school students have better options for learning to become citizens of the twenty-first century. I contend that this is mostly stereotype and sensationalism -- at least, my own experience at the elitest of elite schools has been overwhelmingly positive.

I fear you are already familiar with the charges that William Deresiewicz, writing for the New Republic, recently leveled (seemingly indiscriminately) against the whole of the elite-education-industrial-complex:

• that the preparations required for an "elite college" are, on the whole, soul-destroying;
• that the admissions process is completely, hopelessly rigged;
• that the student body is firstly, invariably "entitled little shits", and secondly, enslaved to some abstract myth of excellence;
• that the same students are four