From a friend who is on the Harvard faculty:
i take a car service to the airport this morning. driver is an older irish boston type, very talkative; do i know the history of cambridge, the reason behind the establishment clause (“[another Harvard professor] didn’t…”), etc. as we’re hitting the airport, he hands me his self-published tract on the crisis in public education and how to solve it by canceling the Simpsons.
“you should put it on the web,” i say, which is what i usually say when handed a self-published tract by a cab driver. “i did,” he said, “and it’s under a creative commons license.” (and, he adds disapprovingly, [the other prominent Harvard professor] hadn’t even heard of creative commons.”)
i had to tell him to put it in a wiki just to retain my sense of being anywhere near the cutting edge.
Here‘s the book.
that’s a great story!
your friend should have told him to put it on a “podcast” to stay on the razor-sharp blade of cutting edge… 🙂
Quite funny, given that the Simpsons is only still on life support thanks to innumerable writers with Harvard degrees.
I don’t think kids watch the Simpsons much anymore, but that could just be my observer’s bias. If he’s talking about public Universities, then maybe he has a leg to stand on…
-kd
Get rid of the Simpsons? What a jerk! This is the best thing on television! This show has so many jokes crammed into every episode that it actually requires that one should be well-informed and reasonably educated, to understand every single nuance of satire. Yes, it is true that most of the writers are graduates of Harvard. That is no accident.
I am glad to see a more widespread use of CC licenses, but I can’t stand these control freaks that want to restrict what people can or cannot see.
Has anybody read it to at least verify his solution is banning the Simpsons?
Shoot… I’ll do a quick scan now.
Read parts of it and found it’s interesting enough to give a complete reading even though I’m a bit wary about some of the references he cites at the end.
I found no mention of the Simpsons (a simple find command). I looked at where television shows up, and while he does betray a disdain for tv for reasons I sympathize with, he did not suppose banning the Simpsons would solve the education crisis.