[ Thanks to Tom
Wickline for this link. ]
“Except for David Ward, president of the American Council on
Education, every member of the Secretary of Education’s Commission
on the Future of Higher Education found enough to endorse in the
draft the panel produced last month to support it over all. All of
them, certainly, also found some aspects of the report
objectionable, yet swallowed those objections and agreed, at a
public meeting August 10, to sign the report. The panel’s members
agreed at the time that the report would undergo only minor copy
editing and ‘wordsmithing’ between then and when it was formally
presented to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings later this
month.“That agreement was nearly imperiled last weekend, though. Gerri
Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Worldwide Public
Sector division, sent an e-mail message to fellow commissioners
Friday evening saying that she ‘vigorously’ objected to a paragraph
in which the panel embraced and encouraged the development of open
source software and open content projects in higher
education….”