Berkeley Goes Offline

A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist named Stacy Nowak went to take
a look at a college course offered online by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called "Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to UC Berkeley; she teaches art at Gallaudet University. But she was displeased with the quality of the closed captioning the university provided on the course's video.

Nowak, who declined to be interviewed for this article, got hold of the National Association of the Deaf, which she's a member of. In doing so she set in motion a train of events that will come to a head on March 15. Already famous for other reasons, the Ides of March will likely stand as a signal day in the development of modern liberalism, or progressivism, as we are supposed to call it. That's when one bastion of left-wingery, UC Berkeley, will give in to the demands of another, the disability-rights movement, to deprive the rest of us of a uniquely wonderful resource of modern technology. It's not as complicated as it sounds.

Since 2012, UC Berkeley (among many other schools) has offered video and audio recordings of many of its courses to the general public, via YouTube and iTunes U. The Seussian acronym is MOOCs, for massive open online courses. Over the years Berkeley's catalogue of MOOCs has grown to more than 40,000 hours of high-end pedagogy. There are introductory courses in economics, European history, statistics, physics, geography, and pretty much everything else. More advanced courses range from "Scientific Approaches to Consciousness" and "Game Theory" to "The Planets" and "Philosophy of Language," this last taught by John Searle, the country's, and maybe the world's, greatest living philosopher. Not all of the content will be to everyone's taste, of course, and I'm sure there's something to annoy anyone sooner or later. Professor Michael Nagler's simpering "Intro to Nonviolence" makes me want to punch something. I probably wouldn't like "Journalism for Social Change," either.

But still, wandering around this digital edifice one can't help but marvel. Has the Internet ever seemed so close to fulfilling the promise of its salad days? Think of it: Anyone anywhere can take a class at UC Berkeley, at their own pace, without tests or note-taking or waking up before noon! And despite the reflexive slanders from conservatives and its well-earned reputation as a hive of left-wingers, Berkeley remains one of the great intellectual centers of the world when it's not being torched by its students. Clicking on a course that seems even vaguely interesting, a former liberal arts major will now and then feel a reawakening of the thrill and sense of elation and limitless possibility that are among the great rewards of brainy adventures. Berkeley's MOOCs constitute an expansion of intellectual opportunity unimaginable 25 years ago.

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Berkeley Goes Offline | The Weekly Standard