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Just the sort of thing that we were talking about in the first part of last night's class: The influence of a conservative movement that would apply a greater business orientation to Texas higher education came into stark relief this week, when the chancellor of one of the state's university systems unexpectedly resigned and the other seemed to push back against regents who have embraced what some call a heavy-handed ideological agenda.

"The real disruptive threat is to the hundreds of institutions that emulate the elite few at the top. Many of them lack the prestige to hold off for-profit competition and the money that the elites can spend on online curriculum. But their challenge isn't fundamentally one of money: online tutorials don't have to be expensive to be effective, as the open-to-all Khan Academy has shown. The much greater challenge for traditional universities and colleges is changing their teaching traditions. Full-time faculty members must not only assent to the inclusion of online learning in the curriculum, they should lead it."

"I can see how a business school can benefit from such an agreement. Still, two questions come to mind: Is this something we are comfortable with, as academics? If so, which other disciplines could benefit from similar agreements? I personally can't believe that the only way to bring social media in the classroom is to have corporate sponsors jump in, but I'm interested in your opinion on the matter, so comment away!"

Device agnostic approach to content distribution (except the Amazon Kindle). Includes Google's book scanning project.

McGill University got hit for deploying an executive MBA program with tuition fees just under $30K. Example of the intervention of the state in education in Quebec.

Here is the video of Russell on the Stossel program

Said Washburn, author of University Inc., a book on industry's ties to academia: "This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing."

"Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying."