{"id":13965,"date":"2014-06-19T15:48:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T19:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13965"},"modified":"2014-06-19T15:48:07","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T19:48:07","slug":"hackademia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13965","title":{"rendered":"hackademia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A university provides amazing resources and assets. I would even\u00a0defend its overall structure to a\u00a0degree. For one thing,\u00a0it is robust against faddish\u00a0ideas. If a university could change more easily, then a discipline like classics would have been shut down\u00a0long ago. But classics is an exciting and generative field today (see <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=8701\">this <\/a>and <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=7066\">this<\/a>). It has survived the\u00a0tough times because\u00a0universities have institutionalized\u00a0tenure, credentials, and departments to resist change.<\/p>\n<p>Still, these structures\u00a0frustrate many valuable\u00a0innovations, especially when academia might interact better with the outside world. Courses must\u00a0last for about 13 weeks\u00a0even though\u00a0real-life projects continue far\u00a0longer than that. Professors must demonstrate regular results, but some especially worthy projects cannot yield publications\u00a0quickly\u00a0enough. Faculty must teach students who happen to be enrolled at their own\u00a0institutions, even if more appropriate groups\u00a0could be assembled by drawing on many colleges\u00a0and including non-students.<\/p>\n<p>These are just examples of the ways in which academia is &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kludge\">kludgy<\/a>.&#8221; When you face a jury-rigged\u00a0mechanism that still works for many purposes, you can just go with it, you can reject it and try to build something new, or you can\u00a0add <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hack_(computer_science)#In_computer_science\">hacks<\/a>: &#8220;inelegant but effective solutions.&#8221;\u00a0Many of my favorite academics\u00a0make hacks because they love the university but don&#8217;t think it quite works for\u00a0their purposes. For instance, they teach their\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.prisonscholarsprogram.com\/\">classes in state prison<\/a>s. Or they assemble\u00a0a set of &#8220;<span style=\"color: #111111;\">semi-formal learning groups&#8221; within a large state university and actually name it &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hackademia.com\/\">hackademia<\/a>.&#8221; Or they start meeting weekly for discussions of political economy and 30 years later have a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.indiana.edu\/releases\/iu\/2014\/06\/workshop-on-the-ostrom-workshop.shtml\">virtual international network<\/a>. Or they <a href=\"http:\/\/civic.mit.edu\/about\">build tools <\/a>with and for lay partners and reflect critically on the results. Or they create a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/activecitizen.tufts.edu\/civic-studies\/summer-institute\/\">Summer Institute<\/a>\u00a0without\u00a0tuition, grades, credits, or official enrollment, and teach it off season\u00a0at (for example) Tufts.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A university provides amazing resources and assets. I would even\u00a0defend its overall structure to a\u00a0degree. For one thing,\u00a0it is robust against faddish\u00a0ideas. If a university could change more easily, then a discipline like classics would have been shut down\u00a0long ago. But classics is an exciting and generative field today (see this and this). It has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13965"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13971,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13965\/revisions\/13971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}