Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Friday, February 20 2009, 15:55 (-0500), Michael Wojcik wrote: Flick Harrison wrote: I can understand the temptation to reduce digital to numbers. There may be such a temptation, but at the end of the day, digital and certain fields of numbers (namely discrete ones), as technical terms, are isomorphic. There's no reduction going on. It should be added that other languages have only one word for both. The French word for digital is numérique. It has the same broad semantics as digital in English (including the notion of a culture numérique). Florian -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Exiled in NYU -- and now.. HELSINKI UNIVERSITY
All EU universities charge fees to non-EU students, as far as I know. I have always had to pay fees as a non-EU student. There were certain exceptions for economically disadvantaged, but everyone else paid. Keep in mind, most students outside North America are paid for by their home governments. The same is true in North America, except that here EVERYONE pays. If Finland is not charging non-EU, then that is the best deal on Earth. I wish I had known. On the plus side, the Congress just appropriated the most money for higher education ever, increased student subsidies, grants and loans, reduced the criteria for obtaining financial assistance, increased the ability of working people to deduct the cost of higher education/training from their tax bills, and tens of billions for basic research. Its not the whole kaboodle, but its a start. Of course, if you get all your news on IRC, you might have missed this. Mike W --- There is vastly more on the negative side. The stimulus package increases affordability to a limited degree, but why should access to a human right be determined by affordability as measured by individual means? Accessibility to public higher education in the United States is declining and appears set to continue declining for the near-term future. Mike W may live in an alternate universe. At my university, about the largest in the United States, the economic crisis and state budget cuts are not just a nightmare, it's an extinction event. The university's historic old campus will survive, although its buildings may be a lot emptier. A new downtown campus, with 7500 students and the smallest, will survive. Two other campuses, representing nearly 17,500 students, are at risk. Despite the stimulus package, probably another $152 million will be cut from the state contribution to the university budget for the upcoming fiscal year, meaning that at least one campus will be shut down. Entire faculties have disappeared and more are slated to go. About 48 degree programs have been terminated. Over 1,000 of our faculty and staff have been laid off; as many or more will disappear in coming budget cuts. Everyone is on rotating furlough days, with a resulting 10-15 percent pay cut. Fall admissions are being ended in one week, or five months early, which will mean 3-5,000 fewer entering students. Those who do enter will face much higher tuition, possibly as much as double. This may not help the university, though, because the state is now sweeping positive-balance accounts into general funds. The stimulus package's Pell grants increases will not meet the probable tuition hikes. Several structural changes are occurring in Arizona higher education, changes that appear in more extreme form here due to the local political climate created by right-to-far-right domination of the state legislature. One is a massive new limitation on the goal of expanded public access to higher education. Opponents of expanded higher education have never been lacking in this state. They believe that education is a commodity to be purchased, not a public service or human right. Public financial support for higher education -- or any other level of education -- contradicts a philosophical predisposition against taxes. The growth of the campuses slated for potential closure has been driven by first-generation college students from the Hispanic, Native American and other minority communities. When programs are cut or closed, their opportunities disappear. For example, admissions to the RN degree program have been halved because it is a very expensive program that needs substantial public subsidy. The public university tuition is $5700 annually; a private commercial school charges over $40K annual tuition for its RN degree program (also 80-90 percent of private college students fail the licensing exam, whereas a similar percentage of public university students pass). Educational access is simply disappearing, with minorities especially hard hit. Another structural change within the institution is the conversion of already-contingent teaching labor into even-more contingent labor. Three-year rolling contract lecturers are being converted into one-year fixed-term lecturers. Instructors with benefits and one-year contracts are being offered faculty associate positions without benefits and on semester-by-semester contracts. Across the university, the proportion of untenured faculty to tenure-track faculty continues to rise. The administration is using the budget crisis to implement its long-desired goal of lower-cost and more flexible labor. There are massive changes in internal administrative structure towards consolidation and cost-cutting. The basic scheme is to take three or four departments, each with their own chair and staff, and re-organize them into schools with one director and a consolidated reduced staff. One result will be reduction in the role of faculty governance,
Re: nettime Exiled in NYU -- and now.. HELSINKI UNIVERSITY
Michael Weisman wrote: If Finland is not charging non-EU, then that is the best deal on Earth. I wish I had known. Yes, Finland does currently offer free education for non-EU students. The bizarre thing is that after getting this free education, you have only 6 months time to find a job, otherwise you have to leave the country. The free education for non-EU students is very likely to disappear if the new law is passed. Some more comments about the Finnish situation - There were simultaneous demonstrations in several cities this week, the biggest one was in Helsinki with approx 1500 participants. This amount does not sound like much, but Finland is a small country and demonstrations are quite rare here. A new petition against the new law is now online, there are right now 3842 names there including 83 professors from different universities, I guess several thousand names will appear within the next days. It's surprising that these demonstrations are happening so late. In 2005 a law was passed that caused big changes in the way universities are managed, basically modifying the Finnish system to fit the Bologna agreement. The new law introduced more careful monitoring of productivity of universities: a lot of new forms to be filled, more numeric goals to reach (funding based on how many papers are produced, how many people graduate every year, etc) and salaries based on the productivity. Some people protested - professor Heikki Patom?ki from Helsinki University has been (and still is) the most visible opponent of this development. I personally studied under the 'old system', where students were given a lot of freedom and responsibility, which meant that instead of rushing through the educational system as efficiently as possible, many of us started part-time work during study time, or did minor subject studies in other schools. In the current system students have much more pressure to get their masters degree in planned approx 4 years. It's maybe needless to say that in my opinion the old system produced better results. The new law that is about to be passed brings many changes to the educational system. The most controversial are currently the changes in high level decision making. Students, researchers, professors and everyone involved in the academic activity might in some cases have no voice in the University board. The board would consist of people decided by the Ministry of Education and funders (=companies). Even the rector of Helsinki School of Economics has objected to this new arrangement. It is very interesting to see how things develop... And how much the laws can actually change what individual people and departments do. There is right now an interesting discussion going on on the iDC list about education, and I thought this comment by Davin Heckman was great: // I mean, there are two distinct things that I do: One is a form of labor: showing up, taking attendance, assigning crap, grading it, and then following some ridiculous grading rubric that assigns a point value to some mundane task that the student is forced to carry out. In exchange, they get a grade and I get money. In my opinion, this is all just a cover for what professors, students, and universities really do. The other thing, and this is what I really do in class, beneath this bizarre theatrical labor, is share thought processes. I mean, I spend so much of my time writing things and sharing them with students, that I have a hard time imagining that anyone could adequately compensate me for it. So much of my writing is done with my heart and mind on my own three children, that I cannot really imagine someone really paying me an appropriate amount of money for it. But I share it with my students because I like them. And the students who really want to explore these ideas, well, they get invited to dinner at my house to talk further about these things. Or we go out to coffee and read extra books together. I really don't imagine that anyone is paying for this or that I am getting money for it. // What Davin is writing about is something that I can experience within the Finnish universities that are about to go through the new changes in structure. There is a lot of uncertainty in the air about the new administrative structure but the people involved in actual teaching know what their basic task is and why they've chosen their profession. This spring I'm working as the curator for the spring show of Helsinki University of Art and Design. This university will be combined with the Helsinki University of Technology and Helsinki School of Economics to form one big 'Innovation University' (this was the official working title) that will be called 'Aalto University'. This initiative is at the heart of the current controversy - the new law was drafted mostly to make this new Aalto University
nettime post for the list serv - Economic Transmissions - How is the current economic crisis affecting you?
I wanted to mention a new project I'm working on, and to invite you, and others you know to take part. Please feel free to spread the word, re-post, etc Economic Transmissions needs your help! We want to know how the current economic situation has been affecting you. What changes are being made in your life and how does this impact you on a daily basis? Are you giving something up, doing less of something or more of something? We need your messages, your sounds, your audio clips, your voices that tell us about how this affects you. These audio messages will be used in the sound and light installation - Economic Transmissions - and will debut at the Synthetic Zero Exhibition Event March 4 and 7, in the Bronx, NY. Please call 212.660.0161, extension 2100 to leave your messages and audio clips that describe how this crisis affects you. If the mailbox is full, please try again the following day. We look forward to hearing your responses. Thanks for your time! ps. -- call 212.660.0161, extension 2100 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
