William Deresiewicz attacked the university reform movement in a recent issue of the Chronicle Review (the left-wing magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education). For example, he went after Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who pioneered MOOCs with his course on artificial intelligence and then quite Stanford and started an education company, Udacity.
Deresiewicz was reacting to a new movie, Ivory Tower, which features Thrun and other educational disruptors such as libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel. But Deresiewicz went on to blast the entire university reform movement as “hustlers and ideologues” and “pied pipers” – people who want to create a “factory model” of education.
George Leef responds to Deresiewicz on the Pope Center site.