The Week

‘Turn Down the Volume’?

You may have noticed that not everyone takes President Obama seriously, not even when he’s delivering a State of the Union Address before Congress, the Supreme Court, diplomats, and cabinet secretaries. But for those who do, or who at least give him the benefit of the doubt, his speech last week seemed notable on two counts.

First, the president still seems to hope that Americans might somehow transcend partisan recrimination and work together to solve some problems. Perhaps this means that his Facebook friends aren’t as badly divided as yours and mine, and that he’s too busy presidenting to spend much time on Twitter (which could make the Easter Bunny a cynic). Or maybe he’s just what Rodgers and Hammerstein cheerily referred to, in South Pacific, as a cockeyed optimist. In any case, he was upbeat.

Second, he said several things tied to higher education. He talked up making college more affordable (“Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that”). He also talked about devoting more money to research, announcing “a new national effort” to cure cancer and adding that we “need the same level of commitment when it comes to developing clean energy sources.” After all, he said, why “pass up the chance for American businesses to produce and sell the energy of the future?”

“Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there,” Mr. Obama recalled. “We built a space program almost overnight. And 12 years later, we were walking on the moon.”

“That spirit of discovery is in our DNA,” he continued, although without saying whether he thinks those same strands of nucleic acids encode for troublesome American inventions like gerrymandering or favoring next quarter’s earnings instead of investing in long-term growth.

Mr. Obama wasn’t alone in mentioning higher education that evening. In the Republican response to his speech, Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina said that in “many parts of society today, whether in popular culture, academia, the media, or politics, there’s a tendency to falsely equate noise with results.”

“Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume. When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference.”

Theology (Cont.)

As spring semester classes began at Wheaton College, in Illinois, some students gathered to protest the termination proceedings underway against Larycia A. Hawkins, the associate professor of political science who said on Facebook that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. And some of her faculty colleagues said they would wear their academic caps and gowns to class to demonstrate their support.

Ms. Hawkins wrote the Facebook post to explain that she was wearing a hijab all through the Christmas holidays to show her solidarity with Muslims. In the aftermath, though, the evangelical Christian college says it needs to investigate “significant questions regarding the theological implications” of Ms. Hawkins’s “recent public statements, including but not limited to those indicating the relationship of Christianity to Islam.” Wheaton requires faculty members to “accept and model” its Statement of Faith with “theological clarity.”

Meanwhile Time reported that Wheaton’s provost, Stanton Jones, had emailed another faculty member to say that while Ms. Hawkins’s Facebook comments were “innocuous,” the college was facing a public-relations crisis nonetheless. “Articles are already being written in a variety of news sources, and the media are pounding on our door asking for comments about our faculty who are endorsing Islam,” he wrote. “We are being asked to defend why we have faculty openly rejecting with [sic] the institution stands for.” (Read more here.)

Or Your Money Back

MOOCS haven’t been much in the news lately. But last week a pioneering provider of the massive open online courses, Udacity, made headlines by offering a money-back guarantee to those who enroll in some programs. Either you get a job in your field of interest within six months or you’ll get a refund, according to the company’s founder, Sebastian Thrun.

There are a few catches, though. First, Udacity’s offer is available only to those in programs whose graduates are highly marketable anyway — programs for Android and iOS developers, senior web developers, and machine-learning engineers. Second, the money-back guarantee costs extra — $299 a month for as long as you’re taking the course, up $100 from the no-guarantee price.

In other business news, the parent company of the giant University of Phoenix, Apollo Education Group, is “in discussions” that could lead to the company’s selling itself. In a news release, Apollo said the move would accelerate “the University of Phoenix’s transformation plan to further enhance student outcomes and provide outstanding, career relevant higher education for working adults.”

Operators are standing by.

Even More News

Lawyers for an associate dean at the University of Virginia who is suing Rolling Stone say the student known as “Jackie” in the magazine’s retracted gang-rape story invented a suitor to spark the interest of someone she wanted to date and then claimed that the suitor forced her to have sex with five other men. “All available evidence demonstrates that ‘Haven Monahan’ was a fake suitor created by Jackie in a strange bid to earn the affections of a student named Ryan Duffin that Jackie was romantically interested in,” the lawyers say in court documents reviewed by The Washington Post. … The U.S. Department of Education has hired Rohit Chopra to help improve services for student borrowers. Mr. Chopra is a former assistant director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped lead investigations of lending practices at ITT Educational Services Inc. and Corinthian Colleges Inc. … Trinity Lutheran College, in Washington State, announced that it would close at the end of this academic year. With just 166 students, “the business model we have is not sustainable,” said the college’s executive director, Jim Lindus.

Young Americans

After David Bowie died last week I pulled the albums of his I could find down off a shelf — David Live, Low, Young Americans, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. I no longer have a turntable, so I couldn’t play them, but I spent so much time listening to those records in high school and college that a glance at any song’s title brings back every note, every word, in just an instant. “1984,” “Rebel Rebel,” " Moonage Daydream,” “Changes,” “Aladdin Sane,” “All the Young Dudes” — and that’s just a part of the lineup of one of the two records in the Live set.

“What is the fascination with David Bowie?” a friend who was a columnist for our college newspaper once demanded of me — in print, in fact, because it was a small college and we could get away with that kind of thing. “That for a year he simply kicked the entire sane world in the ass and became Ziggy Stardust?”

I’m not sure I knew it then, but yes, that was certainly it. For a gay kid in the suburbs, for almost anyone who didn’t fit in and called that rebellion, David Bowie’s music offered refuge from the barbs of parents and classmates, defiance in the face of society’s mindless repression, the hope that you might someday escape convention and actually enjoy life. “Lucy looks sweet ’cause he dresses like a queen,” Bowie sings in “All the Young Dudes,” “but he can kick like a mule, it’s a real mean team.” It was indeed.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.

Correction (2/4/2016, 12:30 p.m.): An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to strands of amino acids as making up DNA, which is in fact made up of strands of nucleic acids. This article has been updated to reflect that correction.

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