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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

Yes, I saw it too.

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).

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

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.

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