Law in Contemporary Society

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ToddDensenFirstEssay 8 - 29 Jun 2015 - Main.MarkDrake
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Capitalizing on Knowledge and Education


ToddDensenFirstEssay 7 - 18 Jun 2015 - Main.ToddDensen
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The Functional Reality of Law School

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What function does law school play? Is it to educate the next generation of lawyers? To teach them doctrine; teach them how to “think?” The first year of law school is unlikely to serve most students more than to teach them to talk like lawyers; use the jargon and maybe to think a little bit more about what a legal issue is. But when does this stop and legal training begin?
>
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What function does law school play? Is it to educate the next generation of lawyers? To teach them doctrine; teach them how to “think?” The first year of law school is unlikely to serve most students more than to teach them to talk like lawyers. But when does this stop and legal training begin?
 
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Lawyers are powerful. They can use words to enact change. But is learning “black-letter law” the best way to train lawyers? One of the strangest things I hear at law school recruiting events is, “It’s okay if you don’t know how to do something when you arrive on the job. We will provide resources for you to learn the how to do it.” That’s well-meaning and great and all, but that really shouldn’t be how it works. Isn’t the point of law school to teach students how to do legal work?
>
>
Lawyers are powerful. They use words to enact change. But is learning “black-letter law” the best way to train lawyers? One of the strangest things I hear at law school recruiting events is, “It’s okay if you don’t know how to do something. We will provide resources for you to learn the how to do it.” That’s well-meaning, but that really shouldn’t be how it works. Isn’t the point of law school to teach students how to become lawyers?
 
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Perhaps that is what most people believe the purpose of law school to be, to train lawyers. The functional reality is that law school generally serves a far more utilitarian purpose – to obtain legal employment. At least that is what Columbia and a number of other prestigious law schools actually do; they get their graduates jobs. Is this then just an overpriced job search associate firm? There might not be anything wrong with that necessarily, but it conflates education and recruitment. Law school isn’t supposed to be an extended job application, it’s supposed to train lawyers.
>
>
Perhaps that’s what most people believe the purpose of law school to be, lawyer training. The functional reality is that law school generally serves a more utilitarian purpose – to obtain legal employment. At least that is what Columbia and a number of other prestigious law schools actually do; they get graduates jobs. Is this then just an overpriced job search associate firm? There might not be anything wrong with that necessarily, but it conflates education and recruitment. Law school shouldn’t be an extended job interview, it should train lawyers.
 
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This isn’t to say learning legal doctrine, history, and theory isn’t important; creative minds often draw on history and theory to envision new paradigms. Law school ought to be about more than that though; it should be about learning how to practice (not simply how to be a firm drone). Law school needs to teach students how to solve legal problems. It is important for the painter to learn about art history, but it’s just as important – probably more important – that she actually learn how to paint. Lawyers practice law, they do not merely study it, and one cannot practice law without actually practicing law.
>
>
This isn’t to say learning doctrine, history, and theory isn’t important; creative minds draw on history and theory to envision new paradigms. Law school ought to be about more than that though; it should be about learning how to practice (not simply how to be a firm drone). Law school needs to teach students how to solve legal problems. It is important for the painter to learn about art history, but it’s just as important – perhaps more important – that she actually learns to paint. Lawyers practice law, they don’t merely study it, and one cannot practice law without actually practicing law.
 

Experiential Learning

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Law school isn’t entirely unequipped on this front. Schools, including Columbia, offer the opportunity for student’s to participate in clinical education. Clinics, unlike most classes and seminars offer students the opportunity to work with practicing lawyers on actual legal issues. This is a particularly valuable kind of experience for young lawyers. When Joshua Horowitz came to speak to the class what struck me was how important he found his relationship with Len Levinson, learning hands on from a seasoned attorney. It occurred to me that experience was as valuable as his entire legal education prior because he learned how to handle actual legal work.
>
>
Law school isn’t entirely unequipped on this front. Schools, including Columbia, offer the opportunity for student’s to participate in clinical education. Clinics, unlike most classes offer students the opportunity to work with practicing lawyers on actual legal issues. This is a particularly valuable kind of experience for young lawyers. When Joshua Horowitz came to speak to the class what struck me was how important he found his relationship with Len Levinson, learning hands-on from a seasoned attorney. It occurred to me that experience was as valuable as his entire legal education prior because he learned how to handle actual legal work.
 
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Clinical education though is limited. At Columbia far too few students have the opportunity to take one, let alone multiple clinics. Alternatively, most classes are taught by academics that do not practice. Humans are highly adapted to interpersonal learning. Learning from others predates written and even spoken language. Yet law school continually offers more classes that treat interpersonal experiential education as secondary to absorption of academic transcendental nonsense.
>
>
Clinical education though is limited. At Columbia, far too few students have the opportunity to take one, let alone multiple clinics. Alternatively, most classes are taught by academics that do not practice. Humans are highly adapted to interpersonal learning. Learning from others predates written and even spoken language. Yet law school continually treats interpersonal experiential education as secondary to absorption of transcendental nonsense.
 
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How can we train lawyers to be powerful advocates for a better society when law school does not prepare them for actual legal practice?
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How can we train lawyers to be powerful advocates for a better society when law school does not prepare them for practice?
 

Shifting the Paradigm

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The model doesn’t make sense. Students should demand more experiential learning, legal employers should prefer students who have it, and schools should be willing to provide it, so why the stalemate? There are problems in each prong.
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The model doesn’t make sense. Students should demand more experiential learning, legal employers should prefer students who have it, and schools should be willing to provide it, so why the stalemate?
 
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Most students seek employment in large firms, where the pawnbrokers do not seem all that concerned with actual legal skills. They care more for students who can work the grind, and demonstrate their ability to do so by grinding through 1L year with good grades on examinations. Students, in turn, largely devalue practical legal education.
>
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Most students seek employment in large firms, where the pawnbrokers aren’t terribly concerned with actual legal skills. They care more for students who can grind, and demonstrate their ability to do so by grinding through 1L year with good examination grades. Students react by devaluing practical training.
 
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Legal academics (i.e. professors) are wary of adding more practical education to the law school curriculum. Last year, Brian Leiter addressed the subject in the Huffington Post. He contrasts other professional schools that utilize plenty of practical education, mainly dental school, concluding, “law is fundamentally a discursive discipline, dealing in norms, arguments, and reasons.” He elaborates further that there are practical problems; schools are not equipped to offer experiential learning in a wide array of disciplines students might be interested in. And finally he concludes with a golden quip that demonstrates the fundamental misunderstanding that legal academics have with experiential education.
>
>
Legal academics (i.e. professors) are wary of adding more practical education to the law school curriculum. Last year, Brian Leiter addressed the subject in the Huffington Post. He contrasts other professional schools that utilize practical education, mainly dental school, concluding, “law is fundamentally a discursive discipline, dealing in norms, arguments, and reasons.” He elaborates further that there are practical problems; schools are not equipped to offer experiential learning in a wide array of disciplines students might be interested in. And finally he concludes with a golden quip that demonstrates the fundamental misunderstanding that legal academics have with experiential education.
 
Forcing most of these students do to fifteen hours of experiential classes would simply deprive them of the class on antitrust or the law and economics of trademarks which they might have taken. Those doing JD/PhDs -- and, yes, they are students too! -- would have had to take classes that would have contributed nothing to their professional development as scholars and teachers.

I do not disagree with Leiter that a mandate of 15 hours by the Bar Association might not be an appropriate measure, but his rationale is flawed. The issue is that Leiter and most legal academics only see value in legal academia because that is what they do. Leiter fails to see that resources could easily be allocated from academics toward professionals, providing students with access to professors with actual client work without the expanding clinical offerings ad infinitum. He is unable to see that using “norms, arguments, and reason” in actual legal contexts - specific to a field a student is interested in or not - might actually be as valuable as simply studying the reasoning of judges in casebooks. And finally, he cannot see the value that future “scholars and teachers” would get from practicing law? Perhaps this is the most telling line of his piece. Most law students will become lawyers, yet legal academics seem inclined on training only more legal academics.

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So here you are, free to take in any direction you like the present professional writing exercise you have with one teacher you can say for sure wants to make a lawyer, rather than a law professor, out of you. So what do you write? An essay about law school....

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Individually, exercises like this essay are tools for growth. Even if law school isn’t changing, I can still use my time here to my advantage. I am anxious to expose myself to clinical education. I can take the black-letter law material I learn, and contextualize it in practice. I can project my future need for skills as a lawyer, and make sure I learn those things from the resources I have, not only through coursework.

ToddDensenFirstEssay 6 - 15 Jun 2015 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT name="FirstEssay"

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 I do not disagree with Leiter that a mandate of 15 hours by the Bar Association might not be an appropriate measure, but his rationale is flawed. The issue is that Leiter and most legal academics only see value in legal academia because that is what they do. Leiter fails to see that resources could easily be allocated from academics toward professionals, providing students with access to professors with actual client work without the expanding clinical offerings ad infinitum. He is unable to see that using “norms, arguments, and reason” in actual legal contexts - specific to a field a student is interested in or not - might actually be as valuable as simply studying the reasoning of judges in casebooks. And finally, he cannot see the value that future “scholars and teachers” would get from practicing law? Perhaps this is the most telling line of his piece. Most law students will become lawyers, yet legal academics seem inclined on training only more legal academics.

Added:
>
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So here you are, free to take in any direction you like the present professional writing exercise you have with one teacher you can say for sure wants to make a lawyer, rather than a law professor, out of you. So what do you write? An essay about law school....

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ToddDensenFirstEssay 5 - 17 May 2015 - Main.ToddDensen
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 -- By ToddDensen - 13 Mar 2015
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The Cost of Time

A few days ago, in Contracts, while the professor waited for the class to settle into their seats, I wondered how much each minute of wasted time was costing the class. Class started two minutes late – or collectively about $446.

Class began and my mind was still far from the subject matter, wasting my own money now. I knew each minute I listened to my professor sat in my seat, Columbia collected $2.32 from me. But what for? Was I paying for the privilege of listening to an accomplished scholar lecture on Contracts? That couldn’t really be what it was right? It can’t possibly cost Columbia $232 a minute in speaker's fees. Nothing that was said was proprietary; nothing about the environment could not be adequately recreated on my computer screen on Coursera.

Participation, engagement, access to professors – these must be where my tuition dollars work. But realistically I will be called on once, maybe twice a semester in this class. I could raise my hand to ask questions and I could go to office hours, but I could also pay a private tutor less to help me more.

 

The Functional Reality of Law School

Added:
>
>
What function does law school play? Is it to educate the next generation of lawyers? To teach them doctrine; teach them how to “think?” The first year of law school is unlikely to serve most students more than to teach them to talk like lawyers; use the jargon and maybe to think a little bit more about what a legal issue is. But when does this stop and legal training begin?
 
Changed:
<
<
What function does law school play? Is it to educate the next generation of lawyers? To teach them doctrine, to teach them how to “think"” Perhaps that is what most believe the purpose is, but in functionally it serves a far more utilitarian purpose – to obtain legal employment. At least that is what Columbia and a number of other prestigious law schools actually do; they get their graduates jobs. So then this is really just a very expensive firm of job search associates. And there might not be anything wrong with that necessarily.

Law school does serve one other function. A law degree, along with passing the bar exam, allows one to practice law New York State. In all but five states, one must obtain a J.D. in order to practice law. It is no secret that many lawyers earn a comfortable living. And after all, the rank of one’s law school generally will correlate to one’s legal job prospects.

So then functionally law school is a regressive measure that permits the wealthy and educated, who can afford to be admitted and attend premier law schools to access the sacred legal profession. All the while keeping the proletariat at bay. You might say admission itself is not limited to the wealthy, but indirectly it is constrained by one's wealth. Anyone with enough money or time (likely because they have enough money that they needn’t work) can study enough to excel on the Law School Admissions Test.

>
>
Lawyers are powerful. They can use words to enact change. But is learning “black-letter law” the best way to train lawyers? One of the strangest things I hear at law school recruiting events is, “It’s okay if you don’t know how to do something when you arrive on the job. We will provide resources for you to learn the how to do it.” That’s well-meaning and great and all, but that really shouldn’t be how it works. Isn’t the point of law school to teach students how to do legal work?
 
Changed:
<
<

The Idealism of the Future

>
>
Perhaps that is what most people believe the purpose of law school to be, to train lawyers. The functional reality is that law school generally serves a far more utilitarian purpose – to obtain legal employment. At least that is what Columbia and a number of other prestigious law schools actually do; they get their graduates jobs. Is this then just an overpriced job search associate firm? There might not be anything wrong with that necessarily, but it conflates education and recruitment. Law school isn’t supposed to be an extended job application, it’s supposed to train lawyers.
 
Changed:
<
<
This needn’t be the system we endorse. Undergraduate education is already changing. University of the People offers accredited degrees completely free of charge. But maybe that is because the financial elite believe the value of undergraduate degrees has eroded enough that they no longer feel threatened. Or maybe that most private universities do not believe this is the future, but this is mistaken.The future is inevitable. Beyond a fathomable horizon, maybe; but inevitable nonetheless. Because knowledge cannot commoditized forever.
>
>
This isn’t to say learning legal doctrine, history, and theory isn’t important; creative minds often draw on history and theory to envision new paradigms. Law school ought to be about more than that though; it should be about learning how to practice (not simply how to be a firm drone). Law school needs to teach students how to solve legal problems. It is important for the painter to learn about art history, but it’s just as important – probably more important – that she actually learn how to paint. Lawyers practice law, they do not merely study it, and one cannot practice law without actually practicing law.
 
Changed:
<
<
I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle. --Stephen Downes
>
>

Experiential Learning

 
Changed:
<
<
This is the most sensible future for education. Free access to information and free advanced degrees. It makes perfect sense. As a species, we are more interconnected and smarter now than we ever have been. As access becomes easier, the chains of inequality loosen. Many homeless now have cellphones. And yes, 3/5 people in the world still do not have access to the internet. But it is only a matter of time before mobile phone service, specifically wireless internet service will be more accessible than clean water.
>
>
Law school isn’t entirely unequipped on this front. Schools, including Columbia, offer the opportunity for student’s to participate in clinical education. Clinics, unlike most classes and seminars offer students the opportunity to work with practicing lawyers on actual legal issues. This is a particularly valuable kind of experience for young lawyers. When Joshua Horowitz came to speak to the class what struck me was how important he found his relationship with Len Levinson, learning hands on from a seasoned attorney. It occurred to me that experience was as valuable as his entire legal education prior because he learned how to handle actual legal work.
 
Changed:
<
<
If only 3/5 of the world have access to this information now, imagine the power of mankind when access to knowledge can increase 150%? But the haves already begin to fear the have-nots and clench ever tighter to their slippery reins. Before our very eyes, knowledge has been transformed into property. Achievements of all mankind reduced to individual effort and latched away from the yearning plebeians. The resistance to knowledge dissemination is a blight, a physical hinderance to our species ability to adapt.
>
>
Clinical education though is limited. At Columbia far too few students have the opportunity to take one, let alone multiple clinics. Alternatively, most classes are taught by academics that do not practice. Humans are highly adapted to interpersonal learning. Learning from others predates written and even spoken language. Yet law school continually offers more classes that treat interpersonal experiential education as secondary to absorption of academic transcendental nonsense.
 
Changed:
<
<
The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.--Aaron Swartz
>
>
How can we train lawyers to be powerful advocates for a better society when law school does not prepare them for actual legal practice?
 
Changed:
<
<
Aaron had a vision, that the work of individual academics is not a piece of personal property that someone can be charged to access. If a man stands on the shoulder of a giant, is he the tallest man? Does the woman who builds a birdhouse own it if she used wood from a tree grown by another? Collective knowledge packaged and licensed is inconsistent with human progress. To progress as a society, we must add to the stack of collective knowledge freely. To do so at a fee is only to create waste, and restrict the number of intelligent people who can build further.
>
>

Shifting the Paradigm

 
Changed:
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<
The more we give away, the richer we become.--Eben Moglen
>
>
The model doesn’t make sense. Students should demand more experiential learning, legal employers should prefer students who have it, and schools should be willing to provide it, so why the stalemate? There are problems in each prong.
 
Changed:
<
<
The connection between knowledge and conferring degrees and qualifications is clear. On the one end, free acess to scholarly work is important for society to advance intellectually. At the other end, free access to degrees, and more specifically advanced degrees empowers individuals. It empowers them to become employed and to become scholars for humanity contributing to the collective knowledge.
>
>
Most students seek employment in large firms, where the pawnbrokers do not seem all that concerned with actual legal skills. They care more for students who can work the grind, and demonstrate their ability to do so by grinding through 1L year with good grades on examinations. Students, in turn, largely devalue practical legal education.
 
Added:
>
>
Legal academics (i.e. professors) are wary of adding more practical education to the law school curriculum. Last year, Brian Leiter addressed the subject in the Huffington Post. He contrasts other professional schools that utilize plenty of practical education, mainly dental school, concluding, “law is fundamentally a discursive discipline, dealing in norms, arguments, and reasons.” He elaborates further that there are practical problems; schools are not equipped to offer experiential learning in a wide array of disciplines students might be interested in. And finally he concludes with a golden quip that demonstrates the fundamental misunderstanding that legal academics have with experiential education.
 
Changed:
<
<
I think the problem on both sides of the essay involves a single point of failure in the social analysis. Teaching is a form of human relationship, between two people, older than speech, which was the primary form of human cultural transmission, before speech, for millions of years. We are highly evolved for teaching relationships, which are not merely transmissions of knowledge. Hence your failure to identify what is either right or wrong with law school. (Your hypothesis that the professional certification function is the primary function of a trade school, whatever the kind, is framed by disregarding the relational nature of teaching.) So is your analysis of the future of education as a social process. To imagine that the personal relationships in education can be "free" is to disregard the scarcity of human sensitivity and attention which is the price of all significant human services. A labor theory of value has become a theory of labor anti-value. But neither teaching nor psychotherapy can be conducted "free" even if, like Cooper Union since the time of Peter Cooper until yesterday, no tuition fee is charged. But Peter Cooper left his land for the tuition-free education of the working class (a job later assigned to the City University of New York, which did indeed provide tuition-free higher education in the 20th century, through socialism) knowing that what a man or woman pays for teaching isn't necessarily the money that pays the teacher's salary, but the half of the relationship that, just like the teacher's half, is indispensable and therefore pricy..
>
>
Forcing most of these students do to fifteen hours of experiential classes would simply deprive them of the class on antitrust or the law and economics of trademarks which they might have taken. Those doing JD/PhDs -- and, yes, they are students too! -- would have had to take classes that would have contributed nothing to their professional development as scholars and teachers.
 
Changed:
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<
NOTES: Joshua - the value of apprenticeship with len levinson vs. law school as a better education? Is better the right word?
>
>
I do not disagree with Leiter that a mandate of 15 hours by the Bar Association might not be an appropriate measure, but his rationale is flawed. The issue is that Leiter and most legal academics only see value in legal academia because that is what they do. Leiter fails to see that resources could easily be allocated from academics toward professionals, providing students with access to professors with actual client work without the expanding clinical offerings ad infinitum. He is unable to see that using “norms, arguments, and reason” in actual legal contexts - specific to a field a student is interested in or not - might actually be as valuable as simply studying the reasoning of judges in casebooks. And finally, he cannot see the value that future “scholars and teachers” would get from practicing law? Perhaps this is the most telling line of his piece. Most law students will become lawyers, yet legal academics seem inclined on training only more legal academics.
 

ToddDensenFirstEssay 4 - 16 Apr 2015 - Main.ToddDensen
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  I think the problem on both sides of the essay involves a single point of failure in the social analysis. Teaching is a form of human relationship, between two people, older than speech, which was the primary form of human cultural transmission, before speech, for millions of years. We are highly evolved for teaching relationships, which are not merely transmissions of knowledge. Hence your failure to identify what is either right or wrong with law school. (Your hypothesis that the professional certification function is the primary function of a trade school, whatever the kind, is framed by disregarding the relational nature of teaching.) So is your analysis of the future of education as a social process. To imagine that the personal relationships in education can be "free" is to disregard the scarcity of human sensitivity and attention which is the price of all significant human services. A labor theory of value has become a theory of labor anti-value. But neither teaching nor psychotherapy can be conducted "free" even if, like Cooper Union since the time of Peter Cooper until yesterday, no tuition fee is charged. But Peter Cooper left his land for the tuition-free education of the working class (a job later assigned to the City University of New York, which did indeed provide tuition-free higher education in the 20th century, through socialism) knowing that what a man or woman pays for teaching isn't necessarily the money that pays the teacher's salary, but the half of the relationship that, just like the teacher's half, is indispensable and therefore pricy..

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Added:
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NOTES: Joshua - the value of apprenticeship with len levinson vs. law school as a better education? Is better the right word?


ToddDensenFirstEssay 3 - 12 Apr 2015 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT name="FirstEssay"
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The more we give away, the richer we become.--Eben Moglen

The connection between knowledge and conferring degrees and qualifications is clear. On the one end, free acess to scholarly work is important for society to advance intellectually. At the other end, free access to degrees, and more specifically advanced degrees empowers individuals. It empowers them to become employed and to become scholars for humanity contributing to the collective knowledge.

Added:
>
>

I think the problem on both sides of the essay involves a single point of failure in the social analysis. Teaching is a form of human relationship, between two people, older than speech, which was the primary form of human cultural transmission, before speech, for millions of years. We are highly evolved for teaching relationships, which are not merely transmissions of knowledge. Hence your failure to identify what is either right or wrong with law school. (Your hypothesis that the professional certification function is the primary function of a trade school, whatever the kind, is framed by disregarding the relational nature of teaching.) So is your analysis of the future of education as a social process. To imagine that the personal relationships in education can be "free" is to disregard the scarcity of human sensitivity and attention which is the price of all significant human services. A labor theory of value has become a theory of labor anti-value. But neither teaching nor psychotherapy can be conducted "free" even if, like Cooper Union since the time of Peter Cooper until yesterday, no tuition fee is charged. But Peter Cooper left his land for the tuition-free education of the working class (a job later assigned to the City University of New York, which did indeed provide tuition-free higher education in the 20th century, through socialism) knowing that what a man or woman pays for teaching isn't necessarily the money that pays the teacher's salary, but the half of the relationship that, just like the teacher's half, is indispensable and therefore pricy..

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ToddDensenFirstEssay 2 - 13 Mar 2015 - Main.ToddDensen
Changed:
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Revision 1 is unreadable
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META TOPICPARENT name="FirstEssay"

Capitalizing on Knowledge and Education

-- By ToddDensen - 13 Mar 2015

The Cost of Time

A few days ago, in Contracts, while the professor waited for the class to settle into their seats, I wondered how much each minute of wasted time was costing the class. Class started two minutes late – or collectively about $446.

Class began and my mind was still far from the subject matter, wasting my own money now. I knew each minute I listened to my professor sat in my seat, Columbia collected $2.32 from me. But what for? Was I paying for the privilege of listening to an accomplished scholar lecture on Contracts? That couldn’t really be what it was right? It can’t possibly cost Columbia $232 a minute in speaker's fees. Nothing that was said was proprietary; nothing about the environment could not be adequately recreated on my computer screen on Coursera.

Participation, engagement, access to professors – these must be where my tuition dollars work. But realistically I will be called on once, maybe twice a semester in this class. I could raise my hand to ask questions and I could go to office hours, but I could also pay a private tutor less to help me more.

The Functional Reality of Law School

What function does law school play? Is it to educate the next generation of lawyers? To teach them doctrine, to teach them how to “think"” Perhaps that is what most believe the purpose is, but in functionally it serves a far more utilitarian purpose – to obtain legal employment. At least that is what Columbia and a number of other prestigious law schools actually do; they get their graduates jobs. So then this is really just a very expensive firm of job search associates. And there might not be anything wrong with that necessarily.

Law school does serve one other function. A law degree, along with passing the bar exam, allows one to practice law New York State. In all but five states, one must obtain a J.D. in order to practice law. It is no secret that many lawyers earn a comfortable living. And after all, the rank of one’s law school generally will correlate to one’s legal job prospects.

So then functionally law school is a regressive measure that permits the wealthy and educated, who can afford to be admitted and attend premier law schools to access the sacred legal profession. All the while keeping the proletariat at bay. You might say admission itself is not limited to the wealthy, but indirectly it is constrained by one's wealth. Anyone with enough money or time (likely because they have enough money that they needn’t work) can study enough to excel on the Law School Admissions Test.

The Idealism of the Future

This needn’t be the system we endorse. Undergraduate education is already changing. University of the People offers accredited degrees completely free of charge. But maybe that is because the financial elite believe the value of undergraduate degrees has eroded enough that they no longer feel threatened. Or maybe that most private universities do not believe this is the future, but this is mistaken.The future is inevitable. Beyond a fathomable horizon, maybe; but inevitable nonetheless. Because knowledge cannot commoditized forever.

I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle. --Stephen Downes

This is the most sensible future for education. Free access to information and free advanced degrees. It makes perfect sense. As a species, we are more interconnected and smarter now than we ever have been. As access becomes easier, the chains of inequality loosen. Many homeless now have cellphones. And yes, 3/5 people in the world still do not have access to the internet. But it is only a matter of time before mobile phone service, specifically wireless internet service will be more accessible than clean water.

If only 3/5 of the world have access to this information now, imagine the power of mankind when access to knowledge can increase 150%? But the haves already begin to fear the have-nots and clench ever tighter to their slippery reins. Before our very eyes, knowledge has been transformed into property. Achievements of all mankind reduced to individual effort and latched away from the yearning plebeians. The resistance to knowledge dissemination is a blight, a physical hinderance to our species ability to adapt.

The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.--Aaron Swartz

Aaron had a vision, that the work of individual academics is not a piece of personal property that someone can be charged to access. If a man stands on the shoulder of a giant, is he the tallest man? Does the woman who builds a birdhouse own it if she used wood from a tree grown by another? Collective knowledge packaged and licensed is inconsistent with human progress. To progress as a society, we must add to the stack of collective knowledge freely. To do so at a fee is only to create waste, and restrict the number of intelligent people who can build further.

The more we give away, the richer we become.--Eben Moglen

The connection between knowledge and conferring degrees and qualifications is clear. On the one end, free acess to scholarly work is important for society to advance intellectually. At the other end, free access to degrees, and more specifically advanced degrees empowers individuals. It empowers them to become employed and to become scholars for humanity contributing to the collective knowledge.


ToddDensenFirstEssay 1 - 13 Mar 2015 - Main.ToddDensen
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Revision 8r8 - 29 Jun 2015 - 20:54:13 - MarkDrake
Revision 7r7 - 18 Jun 2015 - 12:58:15 - ToddDensen
Revision 6r6 - 15 Jun 2015 - 20:47:53 - EbenMoglen
Revision 5r5 - 17 May 2015 - 17:21:59 - ToddDensen
Revision 4r4 - 16 Apr 2015 - 17:42:23 - ToddDensen
Revision 3r3 - 12 Apr 2015 - 22:25:36 - EbenMoglen
Revision 2r2 - 13 Mar 2015 - 18:11:29 - ToddDensen
Revision 1r1 - 13 Mar 2015 - 16:21:30 - ToddDensen
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