Lecture 3 of Michael Sandel’s ever popular course on Justice is now online. Here’s the summary of material covered by the newly added lecture. It’s provided by Harvard’s course web site:

Part 1 -- FREE TO CHOOSE: With humorous references to Bill Gates and Michael Jordan, Sandel introduces the libertarian notion that redistributive taxation—taxing the rich to give to the poor—is akin to forced labor.

PART 2 -- WHO OWNS ME?: Students first discuss the arguments behind redistributive taxation. If you live in a society that has a system of progressive taxation, aren’t you obligated to pay your taxes? Don’t many rich people often acquire their wealth through sheer luck or family fortune? A group of students dubbed “Team Libertarian” volunteers to defend the libertarian philosophy against these objections.

Michael Sandel on Justice: Lecture III is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

The Issue

The fiscal year for major university endowments ended June 30, and schools have been reporting their results: not good. In the Harvard-Yale portfolio game, the latter was down 24.6 percent, while its rival lost even more, 27.3 percent. If you are an Ivy alum, this might seem a good moment to donate to your alma mater, to help rebuild its battered portfolio. But should you, given the power of education to improve people’s lives?

The Argument

Do not donate to Harvard. To do so is to offer more pie to a portly fellow while the gaunt and hungry press their faces to the window (at some sort of metaphoric college cafeteria, anyway). Even after last year’s losses, Harvard’s endowment exceeds $26 billion, the largest of any American university, greater than the G.D.P. of Estonia. By contrast, among historically black colleges and universities, Howard has the largest endowment, about $420 million, a mere 1.6 percent the size of Harvard’s. (Donors gave Harvard more than $600 million just this fiscal year.) The best-endowed community college,Valencia, in Orlando, Fla., has around $67 million, or 0.26 percent of Harvard’s wealth. This is not to deny that Harvard does fine work or could find ways to spend the money but to assert that other schools have a greater need and a greater moral claim to your benevolence…  More here.

Should You Give to Harvard? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

• “Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.” 
• “An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.”
• “Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”
• And finally, “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.”

The numbers suggest that Twitter is not sticking that well. People sign up and then most leave. That’s too bad. But it doesn’t negate the fact that Twitter has been a very useful tool for Open Culture. As we’ve written here before, Twitter has put a human face on our audience and allowed us to get to know you much better. Meanwhile, we can’t say the same about Facebook (although we’re not knocking it.) What’s your experience with Twitter?  (PS You can find us on Twitter @openculture).

Harvard Studies Twitter is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Google and the Path To Enlightenment is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

(Note: you can read the lecture Solzhenitsyn gave upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970 here, and listen to his 1978 Harvard graduation speech here.)

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Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89; David Remnick Reflects is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

(PS Metafilter has posted today some links to other good graduation speeches, including ones by Bono, Vaclav Havel, and Elie Wiesel.)

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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter Author) Tells Harvard Graduates What They Need to Know is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Harvard Law Faculty Votes to Put Articles Online is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

One of the figures behind the opening of Harvard’s scholarship is Robert Darnton, an eminent historian who now oversees Harvard’s libraries. And, in a piece called The Case for Open Access, Darnton underscores how digital publishing can relieve some important financial pressures on the academy. Under the current publishing model, academics write articles for scholarly journals and then the journals get sold back to the university libraries at exorbitant prices, with some costing more than $20,000 per year. And here the real problem begins: “in order to purchase the journals, libraries have had to reduce their acquisitions of monographs; the reduced demand among libraries for monographs has forced university presses to cut back on the publication of them; and the near impossibility of publishing their dissertations has jeopardized the careers of a whole generation of scholars in many fields.” Digital publishing solves this spiraling problem in a straightforward way. The cost of publishing directly to the web is negligible. There’s no pulp to buy, no publisher’s overhead to pay; no corporation (e.g., Reed Elsevier, the owner of many scholarly journals) looking to pad its profits and get thanked by Wall Street. The cost savings are everywhere.

The traditional publishers will be quick to point out a flaw in the digital publishing model – namely, that it generally means working outside of a peer-review system that ensures the overall integrity of research. But my sense is that there’s no reason that digital publishing and peer review can’t go together. It’s not hard to imagine ways in which conventional forms of peer review could be preserved. But digital publishing also makes possible new forms of peer review that didn’t exist before. Publishing to the web will almost necessarily increase the overall readership of articles, which will encourage more fact checking and critical commentary in turn. And, because we’re publishing on the web, these scholarly articles can become living documents that get better over time. It’s a new way of doing things. It may take a generation to get all the kinks worked out and habits changed. But we will get there.

As a final aside, if you’re interested in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, then you’ll want to check this new site sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation. It aggregates blogs that regularly focus on all things OER, offering you a great starting point for reading in this area.

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Harvard Opens Scholarship, Freeing Up Knowledge and Budgets is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Related Content for Philosophy Buffs:

• Philosophy Bites (Philosophers Interviews on Podcast)
• Enlightenment on iTunes: The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
• Philosophy Talk and Intelligent Design
• Plato To Go (The Republic Now on iTunes)

A Short History of Man, God, and Political Philosophy is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Wilson is still pushing this vision, and he laid it out most recently at the TED Talks conference in Monterey, California. (Watch the video below.) The envisioned encyclopedia will be a collaborative enterprise, modeled somewhat along the lines of Wikipedia (see some demonstration pages here). And it’ll be accessible anywhere, anytime, to whoever could benefit from it. It’s expected to take close to a decade to complete the project, although some key components of the database will be available in 2008. (See this FAQ for more details.)

For more information on E.O. Wilson, I would encourage you to listen to Bill Moyers’ profile of Wilson (iTunes – Feed – MP3) which recently aired on PBS. You may also want to give some attention to Wilson’s latest book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.

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The Digital Encyclopedia of Life is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com