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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Mixed feelings on this. I've taken Extension courses from UCSC and from Stanford, and was never under any illusion that the teachers were affiliated with the schools (although one was). For all of them, they tell you in the course description who the teacher is. There's always a course evaluation at the end.

If Caltech isn't monitoring the content of their courses and the student evals, then they're being negligent, for sure. But I don't see this as a systemic problem, other than maybe lack of disclosure.

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> I've taken Extension courses from UCSC and from Stanford, and was never under any illusion that the teachers were affiliated with the schools

What does this mean? Someone from those schools hired a teacher to teach a class sold under their schools brand. That's an affiliation. If the teacher dropped out and you didn't get a refund, you would sue those schools.

What this seems like are schools outsourcing their hiring to private companies. It's a problem precisely because the random teachers get affiliated with the school.

Extension or no, university courses (especially undergraduate courses) are often taught by underpaid lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students, sometimes hired on a term-by-term basis.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for students. At research universities, there is little reason to expect that a tenured faculty member would actually be a better teacher than some random lecturer; faculty are incentivized for fundraising and research rather than teaching. Moreover, experienced faculty may have little recollection of what it was like to actually learn the course material before it became second nature to them.

Courses typically cover the same material, and the syllabus is usually about the same, irrespective of instructor.

> That's an affiliation.

Wrong. The teachers aren't professors of any type, or student assistants, or even employees. Their classes don't give credit towards a degree.

They're contractors.

> It's a problem precisely because the random teachers get affiliated with the school.

Wrong again. I haven't taught a class at UC Berkeley Extension, but if I had, I would not be entitled to say I was "affiliated with Berkeley."

> Wrong. The teachers aren't professors of any type, or student assistants, or even employees. Their classes don't give credit towards a degree. They're contractors.

From Miriam Webster:

affiliated, adjective, af· fil· i· at· ed ə-ˈfi-lē-ˌā-təd: closely associated with another typically in a dependent or subordinate position

What you are saying is like saying "I've taken car rides from Uber and from Lyft, and was never under any illusion that the drivers were affiliated with the companies"

If your organization sells services that are fulfilled by contractors who are vetted by your organization and branded with your organization's logos, then those contractors are affiliates of your organization.

It's nice you can use a dictionary.

In the real world of universities, though, there's a clear distinction between professors, grad students, and Extension teachers. No matter what your dictionary says.

Classic game that universities love to play where they hire someone but that person isn’t “really” part of the university. Happens with extension but happens in degree granting programs too with adjuncts.

As I remembered them, many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university. I took one at Harvard that was taught by a graduate student, and another that was taught by an assistant professor.

I'm personally glad, as a Caltech alum, that Caltech got called out on this bullshit, because these bootcamps really are not related to the university, and just cribbed the branding.

> many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university

This is true, but it's not necessarily an academic affiliation. That isn't inherently a bad thing though, especially for more practical-minded courses. In the mid-aughts, when I was employed by Harvard FAS as a web developer, on the side I also TA'ed for the Intro to Web Development class at the Extension School for a few terms. The instructor and most of the TAs worked for various parts of Harvard IT.

The course material was very current and high-quality as a result of being based on our hands-on day-to-day experience working in web dev, and we generally received very positive scores on student-submitted course evaluations.

Granted, at my day job I also wrote a majority of the online course evaluation system used by FAS + Extension School, but I swear that didn't impact our high marks :) The underlying Oracle DBs were appropriately locked down anyway, as we took privacy laws like FERPA quite seriously.

> many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university.

That might be true at Harvard, but it's not at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, or Stanford. Probably others, but those are the ones I see catalogs for.

(Also an alum) If you look on Reddit people were calling them out two years ago.

That was also good, but the university president doesn't read or pay attention to reddit. He does read the New York Times.

I met him right before the pandemic and I remember he did respond to my email around the time it was kicking off so I know that he does communicate to alums but this honestly might’ve been below his radar

I was the student body president in my last year of school, so I met the current president of the university several times (he came in during my time as a student), and he and I discussed some articles from the New York Times a few times since we were both subscribers.

Also, he and the rest of the administration were very sensitive to press in the traditional media outlets. Social media was mostly immaterial to them. There was a story in the LA times about Math 1a being too hard (for the audience, Math 1a is a "calculus" course that is mostly about real analysis and not that much about calculus), and that caused a big stir that I ended up getting involved with at one point, since I was part of the student government's "course concerns" group.

The current NYT article has already inspired a letter from the president.

Agree on the sensitivity wrt traditional (East Coast) media. Imagine what it takes for the president (and provost, and general counsel, and chief communications officer, and ...) of Caltech to send out an email at 8:30pm on a Sunday night. This article (finally) rattled something at the Institute. However, they are still defending this program, in court, and in the press, as a wonderful thing Caltech is proud to put its name on. 4.6 out of 5 stars! (How many NSF and NIH grants get funded if they are rated 4.6/5 by reviewers? Hint: zero)

You've got faculty calling it a major embarrassment[0] and alumni aligned 100% against this grift. One has to ask, if faculty and alumni (and I presume current students) don't want this program, then who is advocating for it? One can only assume the worst.

[0] https://x.com/CFCamerer/status/1840545142006288667

My belief is that this is one of Tirrell's (the provost) programs given the timeline of when it happened. Bhattacharya may have also had a hand in this - I think he's the current vice provost covering teaching, which tends to also include some outreach-related stuff.

When I was a student, that outreach was mostly citizen science (a very caltech-appropriate form of outreach).

Interesting - I have a contact in the CTLO (the real teaching-oriented group) and they have said they have no contact with the CTME and are discouraged from interacting with them.

While the provost may have approved it, this whole thing is another example of administrators running roughshod over faculty (who are, admittedly, disinterested in this sort of thing). I do (hazily) recall that back when I was a frosh, there was some sort of professional program that focused on engineering management and was a joint effort with places like Hughes and The Aerospace Corporation. Given Caltech's long history with the Southern California aerospace industry, this is at least plausible. This was done through the Industrial Relations Center (page 21 here: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/121/1/1992-1993.pdf)

I agree wrt outreach. It should be Watson lectures and setting up telescopes, etc. This isn't outreach, is an obvious money grab.

I remember IRC bring mentioned in older Techs from the 60s, it had been around a while.

Yeah, the CTLO is not involved with the CTME, but the vice provost of teaching has much more than just the CTLO in their purview - that is a relatively small group. They are also not involved with a lot of other forms of outreach, like the Watson lectures and much of the other science communication Caltech does, as well as a lot of the citizen science done by the institute departments (at the time).

People at Caltech don't realize how much influence JPL has on how the school runs, but it is 3/4 of the annual budget of the organization.

When I had to deal with Tirrell as a undergrad academic rep for curriculum he was sort of an asshole so it tracks.

Yes, I saw it too.

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