University Life in the 21st Century

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Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a short essay about the relative advantages enjoyed by college students whose parents also went to college. I don’t have any special comment on his main point, but I was sort of fascinated by this:

To the extent that I’ve interacted with parents, I’m always fascinated by the contrast between the questions that they ask and my own inside perceptions of the system. My students’ parents went to school before computers were commonplace. Their parents attended college back when faculty could give out 1-page syllabi instead of long documents with disclaimers and policy reminders. Hell, even when I went to college, professors just said “Write an essay on this”, not “Here is a detailed grading rubric for the essay, which you will no doubt try to rules-lawyer me on, hence I had the rubric inspected by experts.”

I don’t have kids, but he’s basically talking about my generation. My professors did indeed hand out 1-page sylliabi and tell us to write essays of a certain length without much more guidance than that. But, um, I gather this is no longer true? Would any university professor types care to comment on this? I didn’t realize that this particular aspect of college life had changed so much.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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