[FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

Sat Oct 30 13:14:49 EDT 2021

>I think the definition of Hispanic-serving is based on the percentage of
Hispanic students which is very high at Highlands

I would be surprised if Highlands had a higher number of Hispanic students
than any of the universities I mentioned.  Compared to to them Highlands is
small.  I wonder why percentage is more important than the total number.
Talk about ethnicism.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 10:58 AM Edward Angel <angel at cs.unm.edu> wrote:

> I think the definition of Hispanic-serving is based on the percentage of
> Hispanic students which is very high at Highlands.
>
> The first year I was at UNM, a colleague and I went to career day at
> Highlands. Because Highlands lacked an Engineering program, we thought it
> would be an excellent opportunity to recruit some of their grads to
> Engineering at UNM, The gym was filled with recruiting tables which except
> for us were all either from the military or the Ivy League schools trying
> to recruit Hispanics. During the morning, not a single student came to our
> table. After lunch, a group of young women came to our table, looked at our
> materials, and then asked if they needed math to study engineering. When we
> said yes, there was a loud “Ugh” and they turned around and left. Only
> students we talked to the whole day.
>
> A few years later, David West would come down to UNM once a week to UNM on
> his bike to teach a software engineering course.
>
> Around that time, we had a very active NM Chapter of SIGGRAPH in NM. I
> worked a lot with Bruce Papier at Highlands who was running a wonderful
> computer art program at Highlands. I believe he too was pushed out during
> the Manny Aragon era. He passed away in Santa Fe a few years ago.
>
> But what I really want to write about is a related story to David’s at
> UNM. At UNM the Latin American (now Latin American and Iberian ) Institute
> is a prestigious research and teaching center. It’s founder-director and
> associate director were not Hispanics. In the mid-90s, Tom Benavides, a
> powerful NM legislator (
> http://insidethecapitol.blogspot.com/2004/05/most-excellent-sir-tom-benavides.html)
> insisted the director and associate director be replaced by Hispanics and
> when UNM refused, the funding for LAI was removed from the UNM budget. The
> result was  that UNM had to come up with funds from other projects to
> support LAI.
>
> Tom was a very popular legislator from the South Valley, so popular that
> there was a movement to create a separate county for the South Valley and
> name it after Tom. But then there was his downfall; drinking and wife
> abuse. When he lost a reelection, UNM seized on the opportunity and hired
> him as a legislative lobbyist. UNM then got back it’s funding for LAI
> without having to replace its leadership.
>
> At the time, I was teaching a lot of short courses in Latin America
> through the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium
> (ISTEC)  which was started at UNM and was administratively under LAI. One
> of Tom’s duties (actually rewards) was to attend the yearly ISTEC
> conferences in Latin America as did I and usually Rose Mary. Tom was
> somewhat uncomfortable outside NM and speaking Spanish, so Rose Mary would
> often invite him to join us for dinner. I always learned a lot about the
> spotted history of NM.
>
> Ed
> _______________________
>
> Ed Angel
>
> Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory
> (ARTS Lab)
> Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
>
> 1017 Sierra Pinon
> Santa Fe, NM 87501
> 505-984-0136 (home)   angel at cs.unm.edu
> 505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
>
> On Oct 29, 2021, at 6:15 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> During the era of which Dave speaks at New Mexico Highlands i had an
> interview for a faculty position in the CS Department there.  I wasn't a
> good match because they were looking for someone in the area of computers
> and the arts.  Among my application materials I emphasized my ability to
> speak Spanish, my family roots in Central NM, and our adoption of a young
> child from Mexico.  Someone told me that it was a mistake to mention the
> relationship with Mexico because Aragon didn't consider Mexicans to be
> Hispanic.  To him that word apparently means someone from one of a few
> families from Northern NM.
>
> At that time there was material that claimed that Highlands was the
> foremost Hispanic serving university in the US.  At the time I wondered,
> "What about UCSD, UCLA, Arizona, UNM, UTexas, etc?"  I think the answer lay
> in his definition of Hispanic.
>
> Frank
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 5:39 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
> wrote:
>
>> Manny Aragon was president of Highlands at the time of my program. He
>> hated me personally for no apparent reason other than my program was
>> gaining publicity and overshadowing his role as "savior" of Highlands.
>> Also, his Board of Regents assigned mission was to reduce the white faculty
>> and increase the Hispanic.Those efforts earned censure for the University,
>> multiple lawsuits by white faculty all of which Highlands lost; and
>> eventually Manny's firing as University President.
>>
>> He arbitrarily and "illegally" (circumventing the faculty and established
>> procedures) cancelled the program. Students demonstrated at Capital in
>> protest; dozens of industry leaders, and all of our clients, sent letters
>> in protest, students directly petitioned Manny to change mind — all to no
>> avail.
>>
>> A little less than two years after cancelling the program, Manny was
>> convicted of embezzlement of federal funds and sent to prison for five
>> years. He was Speaker of the House in the state legislature before coming
>> to Highlands and nothing but a powerful and corrupt and self-aggrandizing
>> politician before coming to Highlands and wreaking havoc.
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021, at 3:33 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>>
>> Dave, Sounds like a wonderful program. Is it continuing? If not, why not?
>> If so, how has the structure changed so that it sustains itself as an
>> ongoing effort?
>>
>> -- Russ Abbott
>> Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
>> California State University, Los Angeles
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 12:40 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Pieter,
>>
>> Your plans are admirable and exciting.I wish you the best in this
>> endeavor. If you would have any interest, I would be happy to share my
>> experience in New Mexico developing and delivering an industry award
>> winning program — the Software Development Apprenticeship.
>>
>> We totally blew up the academy. The program had no courses — instead we
>> defined "competencies" that had to be demonstrated — acknowledged by peers,
>> professors, and industry professionals — at five different levels:
>> basically following directions or rote learning; applying knowledge solo;
>> applying in different context; mentoring others / sharing knowledge; and
>> making an 'original' contribution or extension to the knowledge. Everyone
>> had to master all the "competencies" to level 3, but would vary widely by
>> individual interest in which ones were achieved at higher levels.
>>
>> We had a "one room schoolhouse" where students worked in teams on
>> real-world development projects alongside industry professionals, graduate
>> students to freshmen mixed on each team.
>>
>> If we had packaged the knowledge delivered in the program into
>> traditional semester credit courses it would have been the equivalent of
>> two undergraduate and three graduate degrees. Subjects far transcended
>> programming and other computer science topics to include business (of
>> course since business constituted the vast majority of our projects), hard
>> and soft sciences, writing, presentation, inter-personal and "soft" skills,
>> philosophy and history (Computer Scientists and Software Engineers are
>> abysmally ignorant of their own history and the thought foundations of
>> their discipline), art (including computer graphics of course, but much
>> more), and math (but probability and statistics and geometry instead of
>> calculus).
>>
>> Students learned 'on-demand'. The project to which they were assigned
>> would require some specific knowledge and they would "demand" that
>> learning. Actually, every six weeks, students would complete a learning
>> plan and the faculty had to combine them into a set of modules for lecture
>> and presentation in the ensuing 6-week interval. All teaching took place in
>> the same open lab/classroom, so everyone either directly or by "osmosis"
>> picked up on what was being taught.
>>
>> The program was immensely successful. Our student body came from the
>> poorest county in the poorest state (sometimes Louisiana would take first
>> place) and were woefully unprepared for college. But they succeeded: one
>> exemplar student entered the program lacking even rudimentary user skills
>> like "cut and paste," but was a team leader and J2EE mentor at the start of
>> his second semester. (He was also the only one who figured out why the Hero
>> — movie of same name — did not kill the warlord unifying China in a
>> wonderfully written essay.)
>>
>> Our student body was 70% minority (mostly because of where we were and
>> the mission of the University) and 51-54 percent female.
>>
>> Half of the students in the first year of the program had papers (not
>> student presentations but full papers) accepted to OOPSLA and Agile  both
>> conferences had a 90+ percent rejection rate). Every student was place in
>> jobs, often before graduation and often with the companies who gave us
>> apprenticeship projects.
>>
>> The preceding is just bragging, but I am very proud of what we did.
>>
>> We had two faculty, myself and Pam Rostal and both of us worked 70-90
>> hour weeks which would not be sustainable long term. We did attract a lot
>> of attention and industry "superstars" would drop by to mentor in their
>> particular area for 2-3 weeks at a time.
>>
>> If you have interest in any details, please ask off-list and I will be
>> happy to respond.
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021, at 12:25 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>>
>> The public education system in South Africa is largely broken. For those
>> who can afford it, we have very good schools, but the majority cannot and
>> the education options for them are bleak.
>>
>> I plan to do something about it.
>>
>> This is my second attempt. About three years ago I started a school as a
>> proof of concept with a radical model to have very high quality yet very
>> low cost education and it failed miserably. (I managed to make plans for
>> the kids and I don't believe any suffered from the experience - I pulled
>> the plug before too much harm was done). I've thought, and discussed it a
>> lot, and I'm ready to roll out my second, very different attempt.
>>
>> The basis of this is that there are plenty of resources available for
>> free, and provided you manage the environment properly, kids can and will
>> teach themselves.
>>
>> My plan is a model with two legs, both legs offering very high quality
>> education, but the first leg is relatively expensive and has "bells and
>> whistles" to attract the wealthy and the second is bare bones to make it
>> affordable for those kids whose parents can't pay.
>>
>> The profit from first leg schools then cross-subsidise the costs of the
>> second leg schools.
>>
>> The concept for both legs are copied from https://www.khanlabschool.org/
>> , adapted for local conditions of course. The second leg schools will just
>> be a low cost version, but the education offered will still be world class.
>>
>> Our academic year starts in January. I'm working flat out to have my
>> first school of the first leg open in January 2022. Then to have the first
>> school of the second leg open in January 2023. Then to learn from the
>> experience, adapt and roll it out so that every child in South Africa has
>> access to world class education in five years time.
>>
>> Pieter
>>
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