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U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, angered many faculty members last week as word spread that he had suggested dealing with college costs by replacing instructors with documentaries of the sort made by the much honored Ken Burns.
"If you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas," Johnson said. He added that ideas like this are blocked by the "higher education cartel" and tenured professors.
It also turns out Burns doesn't like the idea. He weighed in on Twitter:
