UC Berkeley told to cough up $5m in compensation to comp-sci, engineering students recruited to teach classes

Re: ... another thing about Cal and CS...

Neither UNIX or BSD existed at Cal when Woz was there. UNIX didn't get to Berkeley until 1974 (in the form of so-called "Research Unix", 4th Edition (upgraded almost immediately to 5th Edition)). Woz was gone before 1972. 1BSD was released in '77 ...

Re: ... another thing about Cal and CS...

He later dropped out, and had a significantly larger impact on computing that I ever did... so much for the value of a degree

So much for the value of an anecdote, anyway.

Re: Exploded Ironymeter...

Don't confuse Cal with the town of Berkeley. They are two very different things.

Re: Standard business logic

And, of course, the sudden need for extra teaching capacity came as a complete shock in the wake of the rapid rise of enrolment and couldn't possibly have been planned for by taking on more full-time staff.

Re: Just another example?

I'm afraid that golden age never really existed. At a certain prestigious British university, it was in my time, and is now, entirely a matter of the luck of the draw as to whether your tutor/supervisor was a student (though usually a postgrad) or a senior member of academic staff. It was, and still is, the case that students get paid a fraction of what a member of academic staff would be paid (on top of their normal salary) for their supervision time. In my time as a student, the venerable professor (who was indeed a CS pioneer) hadn't bothered to update his lecture notes in years - copies made from copies on mechanical duplicators of code examples that no contemporary machine in the department could compile.

It's true that students are now largely seen as a source of income, but in the past they were largely seen as a source of inconvenience. Rarely has there been much enthusiasm for educating them.

Re: Just another example?

The almighty buck has for a long time dominated decision-making

So what's your solution? Running a university is expensive. US universities rely heavily on non-tenured faculty (fixed-term and part-time) and high-tuition students (foreign and legacy) because they have to pay the bills and state support has plummeted over the past couple of decades. Students who aren't wealthy rely on loans they already can't afford, so they oppose tuition increases.

Nobody really wants to learn - they only want the diploma; nobody really teaches - they just cram folks for exams; exams are increasingly multiple choice, which just tests parrot memory, not understanding.

Sigh. It's easy to lob generalizations. I've been an academic (including a number of stints teaching) and many of my friends and family members are in academia, and I'm calling bullshit on this. Most of the professors and instructors I've known take teaching very seriously indeed, and a majority of the students - undergraduate and graduate - are sincere about learning, for the most part.

Multiple-choice exams may be common in some areas, particularly for recitation classes; it's not feasible to grade several hundred essays in a couple of days. But I can only remember seeing a couple of them while studying for my three degrees (or the fourth that I never finished).

Setting that University teaches the future leaders of business how you act and what you do, should we be surprised at the consistency of actions here?