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| DATE | 2017-03-15 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] One step forward,
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On 03/15/2017 11:00 AM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2016/09/21/department-of-justice-wages-war-on-free-education/&refURL=&referrer=
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Department Of Justice Wages War On Free Education
Preston Cooper ,
Contributor
I write about the economics of higher education.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
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A federal investigation will likely force the University of
California-Berkeley to take down the online courses and lectures it
offers for free—all in the name of “equality.”
Even worse, the Department has struck a blow against innovation in a
sector that desperately needs some new ideas.
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A federal investigation will likely force the University of
California-Berkeley to take down the online courses and lectures it
offers for free—all in the name of “equality.” No matter that while
campaigning for free community college, President Obama said that
“education has always been the secret sauce, the secret to America’s
success.” His Department of Justice must have missed the memo.
UC-Berkeley offers free online courses on several platforms, including
iTunes U, YouTube, and edX. It offers massive open online courses
(MOOCs) in subjects such as introductory statistics and financial
planning. One MOOC teaches writing skills and includes practice
assignments for the Advanced Placement (AP) examination in English
Literature and Composition. Such a course could be useful to high school
students who wish to take the AP exam but cannot afford expensive tutoring.
The horrors of free education are apparently too much for the Department
of Justice. Last month, Rebecca Bond of the Department’s Civil Rights
Division sent a letter to UC-Berkeley fretting that the free courses
were not sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities under the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The complaints include a lack of
captions on some videos for deaf listeners and “insufficient color
contrast” in some video lectures which is “difficult for an individual
with low vision to discern.”
Also on Forbes:
The letter demanded that UC-Berkeley retool its online content so that
“individuals with vision, hearing, and manual disabilities can acquire
the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the
same services as individuals without disabilities with substantially
equivalent ease of use.” Most egregiously, the letter instructed the
school to “pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for
injuries caused by UC-Berkeley’s failure to comply with [the ADA].”
The letter did not touch upon how, precisely, one can receive a refund
for a free service.
Last week, Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education Cathy
Koshland released a statement on the Department’s letter. She wrote that
UC-Berkeley has never received clear regulatory guidance on how to
comply with the ADA, yet the Department has decided to punish the school
anyways. Her statement implied that the Department’s actions will
probably force the school to simply stop offering its content online for
free.
“In many cases,” wrote Koshland, “the requirements proposed by the
department would require the university to implement extremely expensive
measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for
free.”
Her position is understandable. Much of the content on UC-Berkeley’s
YouTube channel, which has nearly 300,000 subscribers and over 40
million views, comprises recordings of lectures given on campus. The
expense required to write complete captions of professors’ remarks and
descriptions of all content written on blackboards would be
prohibitive—there are 13,800 hours of content on the YouTube channel
alone. It is much easier to simply take the videos down.
Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson has pointed out the growing
problem of lawyers filing frivolous complaints or lawsuits on behalf of
disabled individuals. They take advantage of pliant regulatory bodies
such as the Department of Justice or defendants wishing to avoid large
legal expenses and pocket a hefty share of the settlement. One lawyer in
Arizona filed over 2,000 lawsuits under the ADA in a single year.
Lawsuits have also been filed against Harvard and MIT over those
schools’ MOOCs alleged noncompliance with the ADA.
Recommended by Forbes
Universities should certainly strive to make their courses as accessible
as possible to people with disabilities. But the government should not
set up a dichotomy between “access for all” and “access for none.” About
one percent of the American population has “severe difficulty” hearing
or seeing, according to the Census Bureau. If an institution can make
knowledge freely available to 99% of the population, the world is still
much better off.
Instead, the Department of Justice has decided to restrict a world-class
education to the ranks of the elite who manage to attend UC-Berkeley in
person (total in-state cost of attendance: $33,418). Even worse, the
Department has struck a blow against innovation in a sector that
desperately needs some new ideas. Ironically, a law intended to promote
equality has found itself with enforcers determined to do anything but.
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