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"Gates Wikipedia University? June 10, 2011, 12:42 pm By Richard Vedder I received an e-mail from James Loynd recently, commenting favorably on an appearance I made on PBS's News Hour. Mr. Loynd asked, "What if the best professors in every department were to video tape their lectures? A student could them work his/her way towards a degree off campus. Even chat-room discussions with grad students could assist the students. Testing could be…not necessarily on campus, maybe even at your local YMCA." Of course, this is not the first time the idea has been suggested, but the question arises: Why are we not moving aggressively to do something like this? More specifically, why doesn't someone-say, the Gates Foundation-hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb courses online, with testing administered by an outside agency (say, the ACT, SAT, or Underwriter's Laboratories)? Even paying each professor $100,000 per course and allowing for 100 percent overhead, this would cost $30- to $40-million. There would be some expenses for administration and a need to redo lectures every few years, but the whole thing is within the financial capacity of several foundations in the private sector. The upshot would be that a student taking about 32 of the courses would have the equivalent of a B.A. degree, and it could be offered to the student free (with modest per-student private or government subsidies) or at very modest cost. If someone proposed to do this, of course, there would be all sorts of objections. Some would argue you need more disciplines included, more courses, etc. And who would accredit the institution issuing the degree? Most such objections are trivial or bogus-for example, a college student does not have to be offered detailed study in every discipline in order to acquire a body of knowledge over roughly a four-year period that is the equivalent of a decent-quality bachelor's degree. Some fu

"All the President's Profs December 22, 2010 Calling them Mr. Jefferson's Justice League is somehow irresistible. Perhaps that's because the University of Virginia's Faculty Budget Advisory Committee resembles a gathering of superheroes, where brainiacs of varied disciplines combine their powers to confront a common enemy. Granted, the villain - deteriorating university resources - is not as sexy as, say, Lex Luthor. And the scholarly powers of endowed chairs are hardly gamma rays. At the same time, there's a sense Virginia has responded to a difficult economic environment in part by convening an astute assembly of professors on a campus founded 191 years ago by Thomas Jefferson. The 13-member crew, whose membership is weighted toward those with some business or finance acumen, is charged to serve as an informal advisory group to Teresa A. Sullivan, the university's recently minted president. But Sullivan says the committee is also designed to bring transparency to the institution's often-mystifying budgeting process, connecting the university's administrators with a diverse pool of faculty. "It seemed to me a shame these two groups of smart people hadn't sat down with each other before," she says. Unlike a standard faculty budget task force, the advisory committee isn't necessarily engaged with a particular issue, such as where the university should cut or invest. Instead, it is grappling with more fundamental high-level questions, such as whether the university operates with sufficient liquidity - or cash on hand - to pay its bills should there be another huge economic plummet. Another point of distinction for the budget committee is its make-up. Like most university-wide committees, the group includes professors across a range of disciplines. At the same time, Sullivan clearly sought a number of faculty with business orientations, and committee members were charged to "draw on on their own expertise in financial matters to prov