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Several years ago, I started musing about the potential for an upscale for-profit college. (Here’s the first piece in which I floated the idea of “Mercedes U,” back in 2005.) Since then I’ve returned to the idea several times (such as this piece from 2010, and this from 2012). Founders College gave the idea a shot several years ago, but flamed out quickly due to terrible planning and a quixotic Ayn Rand fixation. As far as I know, that has been the only credible attempt.

Picture this: one day, after a morning when you desperately tried to cope with a schedule without anything related to your academic credentials, that continued with a less academic business meeting and an even less intellectual afternoon of careful family budget planning, you have a moment of truth. For almost ten years, or even more, you had had a hard time trying to get the best grades at the university and read all the complicated and sophisticated books included in the bibliography.

The other day I had one of those realizations that come initially as a total surprise, and then on further reflection seem glaringly obvious. We are in the middle of campus creative renaissance built on learning design.

One would think that an economist who teaches math, including one math class that teaches the statistical program SPSS, would be very knowledgeable about how computers work. Alas, that is not actually the case. While I use computer programs to do my research, and write SAS and Fortran programs to do so, the actual workings of the computers that I depend on are still quite a mystery to me. My father was an electrical engineer, and therefore had more of a sense of how these mysterious boxes turned what are basically “on” and “off” switches into the tools that make my life possible. I, however, went to college in the final years before the personal computer became a fixture in our homes, and had very little education as to how they work. Much of my early research was done on mainframes (either locally or remotely), and I still find myself with a sense of ignorance about personal computers.

If the root cause of our sustainability problem set (not just climate change, but neither excluding climate change) is societal behavior patterns and the habits of thought that facilitate them, then there's no institution better positioned than higher ed to address the problem. Yet, for practical purposes, we seem not to be doing so in any significant manner. Most of the sustainability-related research of which I'm aware focuses on metrics ("how bad is the problem this week?"), mechanics ("how do these two elements of the problem seem to interact?") or technology ("how can we continue to do -- as much as possible -- what we've been doing, while decreasing the negative unintended consequences?"). The researchers, almost without exception, consider themselves to be seriously engaging with the problems at hand. And, within the conventional mindset, they are. But it's the conventional mindset that got us into this mess.

We don't need adaptive learning because we already have something better, adaptive teaching.

Tomorrow American University's Washington College of Law, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, inaugurates the Cherry Blossoms Conference on Federal Intellectual Property Policy: Accessibility, Copyright and New Technologies.

A left coast correspondent writes: "I have been trying to get my foot in the door in CC's in southern California for a year now. I must've called a dozen or more schools, applied through the online systems, and informally sent my CV and cover letters to the chairs and vice chairs of several departments. While I am still trying, I am also applying to full-time jobs. I've read that CC experience is a must--that I must have experience teaching the CC student body."