Re: <nettime> New Media Education and Its Discontent

[Martin Hardie <auskadi@tvcabo.co.mz>]

This thread surely grows. I have missed a lot of it as I have been 
driving for ten days throuh South Africa's twilight zone but as I have 
tried to get my head around the postings but firstly what

Keith Hart wrote:

hit me in the face:

> The USA is the only country in the world where higher education of
>> a highly variable sort is universally available. 

How could you argue that a country with such prohibitive university fees 
an costs could in any way be "the only country in the world where higher 
education ... is universally available"?

Universally available implies that access is equally open to all - 
having taught in a US university this seems to me not to be the case at all.

I am now a post grad research student at an Australian university, the 
country  where I got my law degree - virtually for nothing.  To 
undertake the degree I am now at a US institution woudl have have cost 
me at least $40,000. My fees however are less than $100 US per year. 
Whatever attacks may be made on the Australian system it surely is 
closer a universally available system than the one Keith suggests.

In response to the part of the discussion about the standard of US 
undergraduate teaching/assessment and students I was tempted to post one 
of the many nasty emails I have from my students saying that my courses 
where unfair as they were too hard ... but I have resisted.

Martin






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