Chris: Seems to me that I heard of the Cornell hotel management school years ago
but no specific memories to draw upon. Have you seen the two e-mails about Schweitzer University? The concept of SU meshes nicely with what Cornell is doing. I'd go further and say that there is some similarity to your idea of rethinking the university as a city, but more in spirit than in any kind of comprehensive way. There are major issues with that approach, especially skill levels and factoring in the market. For some jobs you can almost be any age, but for others you really need a lot of education and as much relevant experience as possible. Young people of 19 or 20 simply don't have the preparation. Doctors obviously, lawyers at least in some specialties, engineers for any kind of projects that involve higher math, and so forth. In other fields it is good to have high profile names on one's "team." There is one kind of project where a university might be a de facto city, however, at least for a while, say 20 years or somewhat longer. Long ago, can't remember exactly when, my idea was to re-develop a town on the shores of the Salton Sea. The process had started but the Depression killed the effort and as much as was built became a social backwater and the sea itself gradually became a polluted nightmare. Regardless, the Salton Sea has considerable potential, at a minimum as a retirement community, but maybe far more as a resort community for folks from LA or California more generally. How do you basically create a city from scratch? You would need just about everything, from quality architecture to construction of street and sewers, to environmental cleanup and maintenance, to schools and fire departments. All right, start with the nucleus of a campus, only the new "college" would be based entirely on building the new city of, uhhh, Venus. that has a nice ring to it. Anyway, although there necessarily would need to basic courses, new versions of classes in standard Liberal Arts & Sciences curricula, everything else would be focused on building the city. Some teachers would be recruited from academia but most would have to have serious real world experience -as construction superintendents, as fire marshals, as hospital administrators, as restauranteurs, and you name it. To be sure, some sort of agreement would need to be worked out with trade unions, and there would need to be some effort made to get all legal stuff in good order so that there would not be those kinds of troubles down the road, but basically students would also be employees and learn what they need to know through direct experience, not only from hitting the books. I'd also like to see what could be done if Venus was constructed with high tech in mind from the outset. Bring in the biggies from Silicon Valley, Microsoft, Texas, Boston, etc and let them pitch their concepts and offer to show the world what a 21st century city could look like if computers were integral to everything -from day #1 onwards. I'm skeptical about: "households up to ~100 residents that publish and enforce their own particular values, especially around Money, Sex, and Power." To me this says that values are relative and right and wrong can be voted on because there is no objective right and wrong. That view is something that I can't accept. As I see it, while there is some latitude about issues like monogamy vs serial monogamy vs polygamy, for example, after all, the Bible justifies each of there systems in one book or another, other kinds of behaviors are "outside the pale" and are totally unacceptable. And there is all kinds of psych research that bears directly on moral issues, even researchers at Johns Hopkins, once pro-homosexual, are now saying that homosexuality can be and often is dysfunctional. My view is that it always is dysfunctional -which is what the Bible also says. This goes farther than matters of sex. What about greed, gluttony, such practices as sadism, rejection of modern medicine, and so on? What happens if one community refuses to vaccinate their kids? What if another wants to make itself all lily white or all ebony black? You can see the problem. There needs to be (as much as possible) objective standards of right vs wrong. As you can tell, I am strongly anti-libertarian about these kinds of things. "Everyone must become expert at something that has intrinsic value to society. " I agree completely. But I'd add Professor Kirshner as contributing value to society, and -speaking hypothetically- a certain well proportioned blonde lady-of-easy-virtue at Mustang Ranch once upon a time I'd guess that Venus would be fully built in about 20 years. There could be expansion after that, and the university might remain, but it would then need a more conventional mission. Yet maybe the idea would be to build another new city in 20 or 25 years and the core faculty, etc of the school would then relocate to Colorado or Michigan or Louisiana or, mmmm, Montana. Billy ----------------------------------- ________________________________ From: Centroids <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 1:39 PM To: Billy Rojas Cc: [email protected]; Chris Hahn Subject: BLISS Muniversity Re: [ RC ] Re: Values Academies OK, what is your theory? Are you familiar with Cornel’s hotel school? https://sha.cornell.edu/ The reason they are so great is because the students are actually running a real live hotel. The same way we train doctors and scientists, but hardly anyone else. What if we trained citizens and political leaders the same way, by curating a real world experience? BLISS Stands for Barkworth’s Live-action Incarnational Ssocietal Ssimulator. Barksworth is a character I literally dreamed up, where I’ve been imagining how he and his ex-supermodel wife go about accidentally reinventing society (nothing written down yet, alas). The Municipal University reimagines college as a city. There are no departments or businesses. Everything is a “service”, with a triple mission of serving customers, training students, and improving the state of the art. The city itself is run by the government service, which periodically experiments with different models of governance. Values are taught by Dunbars, Households or collections of households up to ~100 residents that publish and enforce their own particular values, especially around Money, Sex, and Power. The Muniversity does not prescribe these, but does enforce the core values of: - respect - science - service Thus, Dunbar’s (or larger Clans that share the same explicit values) are tracked by the success of their alumni to develop an empirical dataset About the impact of different values and practices. Rather than a rigid distinction between staff, faculty, and students, each person can participate in different roles depending on the context. Some start out sponsored, like traditional students, but can quickly earn BlissBucks as their skills mature (whose exchange rate with US Dollars is managed by the Finance Service). The joke is that the only jobs you cannot train for at BLISS are “Prostitute” and “college professor.” Everyone must become expert at something that has intrinsic value to society. There is no formal graduation; You can grow up, get married, and buy a house with an off-campus Dunbar while still being a citizen of the muniversity. Though most eventually get Commisioned to live out BLISS values elsewhere. Anyway, this was more intended as a plot device and social commentary that a practical proposal. But it was a fun thought experiment. And an interesting hypothesis about how to answer your question. Thoughts? E Sent from my iPhone On Feb 12, 2018, at 12:31, Billy Rojas <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I will make a wild guess and say that you agree with the sentiment. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. 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