Oxford or Cambridge Distance Learning

Close - Just about every town over here seems to have the following places: an Indian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a fish & chips place, and a pub. The first three may be available just as take-out. I also see a lot of strange combinations. For example, the place we order most of our take-out from offers a mix of pizza and chinese food (& manages to do a good job on both).

 

Cambridge question - When one earns a degree, does it matter which college within the system one attended? Is there snobbery within the system (ie. "You only went to Girton (snicker, snicker). Well, I proved myself through survival of the fittest at Darwin"?

 

re: Oxforf colleges status

There definitely is a scale of academic status at Oxford, based upon what proportion of each college's graduates obtain "Firsts"

For those who care about such things, some colleges have more social prestige than others. Usually this is measured by the proportion of "public" (eg private) school enrollment.

Of course, 95% of the population of England know nothing of these distinctions.

 

All,

I mostly just browse this forum, as the majority of threads are very Western Hemisphere related, so nice to see one that mentions my homeland!

A few comments:

1) Oxford & Cambridge will always carry exponentially more prestige than any other UK university. Imagine another uni competing in the boat race.

2) British food is generally pretty bad. But look around and you might find the odd good dish. Try the Sunday roast and a good cooked breakfast, and the world will seem a better place. As an Irish-born Englishman living in Scotland with my Mexican wife it's more fun mixing and matching cuisine. By the way, the service in US eating establishments is infinitely better than in the UK. May be something to do with the larger gratuities, but not solely I think.

I will attend the Henley Management College MBA Preview Day this weekend. Will let you all know what I think.

Long rifle, go in peace,

Dave

 

Of course, that's only this year; the Summer schedule changes every year. Unless the Big H has a policy of not offering the IT courses over Summer ever, I don't see why one couldn't take a course over one of the next few Summers. Also, aren't there a couple courses that one can take to fulfill the requirements in that program that aren't specifically IT? Why not take something like that in the Summer?

 

Anything is possible. I was hopeful for the last two summer sessions. The pattern is consistently discouraging.

I've examined the options every which way. I cannot figure out an alternative better than a very heavy spring semester. If the schedule varies or I miscalculate, then I'm stuck for 2 semester residencies.

This topic has been under my skin for a while. I feel it's a red herring that misleads observers.

The Harvard ALM is not a distance program with a short residency. It is a resident program that is 60% available for distance viewing.

 

Speaking of English "cuisine", what exactly IS "Bubble and Squeak"?

Bangers and mash I figured out.

 

Oxford Master of Studies prerequesites

little fauss (quote):

"Like he says, it appears to be just another name for an LL.M., as the standard requirement for admission is a first degree in law (although it can be waived, I suppose if you're Nelson Mandela or Elie Wiesel or someone like that)."

Elie Wiesel went through the ULTIMATE school of hard knocks. Nelson Mandela wouldn't be far behind, either.

Now THERE'S an idea for a REAL reality show.

 

Re: Oxford Master of Studies prerequesites

Would not want to attend Wiesel U of Hard Knocks! Have you read "All Rivers Run to the Sea"? Partial autobiography, covers his years in death camps, unreal what he saw and went through. Still haunts me almost 10 years after I read it; there are things that occurred in the Holocaust that still aren't talked about much in polite society, horrors that most people don't even know about to this day--terrible! That word's not even strong enough, just as, on the extreme polar opposite, no word good enough to describe the one who gave the tablets to Moses on Sinai.

 

Re: Re: Oxford Master of Studies prerequesites

Read La Nuit of Wiesel as well for a complete, vivid image of human beings. Not a pretty one.

Wiesel is a remarkable man. A truly outstanding person. You can see it through his writings. That book changed forever my idea of man.

 

In my case, it was "Night". The images were so horrific that he didn't really even need to describe them in detail.

I heard him speak, once. Don't remember what he said, though.

 

the evanescent Mr Wiesel (a famous Carpathian, BTW)

Me too, me neither. It was a small group discussion and I was too terrified to ask him anything. It was one of those occasions you think may well be life-changing, and somehow you can't remember any of it. Puzzling.

 

Haven't read "Night", but will get around to it; you had a rare honor hearing him speak, I'd love to hear him someday before it's too late.

I'll go ahead and describe the particular scene that Wiesel witnessed that so haunts me, but you won't like me for doing it: He said that he watched as young Jewish children were herded into burning ovens alive; he said their spirits were so broken that they went willingly, in a row, like the destitute moving forward in a soup line. Even though he saw it with his own eyes, he couldn't believe it, thought it must have been a nightmare. Years later an acquaintance confirmed that this horror had actually occurred. I know this is getting heavy, but to think of any child being subjected to such as that, their spirits so destroyed that they would submit to it, makes me want to cry--words escape me. To quote Geo Washington: "My God, what then is man?"

And to think there are still those who pretend there is no evil!

 

Oh, there's evil, all right. A better question is, "where was God?" Who was it that said that the most shocking thing about evil is its banality?

Thing is, evil is often dressed up in bright colors and patriotic or religious sentiments.

The one SURE way to tell is that evil ALWAYS deals in the torture, brutalizing, and murder of ordinary people who have done nothing to harm the evil brute but whom the brute chooses to call "the enemy".

EW visits synagogues, I guess, or maybe it's that he contacts the Jewish community in whatever city he is scheduled to speak in.

My Temple took him to dinner. I didn't fish for an invite. Something of the gas chambers still hangs about the man.

 

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

 

God was in the Ten Boom family--ever read "The Hiding Place"?--; God was in the actions of Oskar Schindler; God was in the winter storm on the Russian Front that killed many of the monsters midway through the war; God was in the UN--of all things!--that gave His Chosen People a homeland a few years after the nightmare was over; God was in the skies guiding the hands of the fighter pilots as they won the Six Days War against unbelievable odds.

God was and is guiding the history of the world, keeping His Chosen People together, who hold still to an identity after almost 4,000 years of holocausts against them. That's enough evidence for me--dayeinu!

 

Sure. But that doesn't do much to explain all the children at Treblinka, does it?

 

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that because evil happens there is no God. That's a slippery slope you don't want to slide down. First, it ignores the legitimate reasons why God might allow evil to exist, such as: to teach us what life is like when we rebel against His commandments, or to force us to look to Him in desperation, etc.

It also ignores the fact that we would very much NOT like the world in which God refused to allow evil. Think about it, I assume you treasure your free will, don't you? Would you want it to be such that we were automatons who only did good, unable to think for ourselves?

When we think of evil, we usually think of someone else: Nazis, Dictators, or--if you will--Antonin Scalia. But we seldom want to focus the lens on ourselves. Would you want the world to be such that every time you wanted to relish in a bit of foul thought about your enemy or to laugh at his misfortune, that you were blocked from thinking it? What about those things that you do--those things that you secretly relish but know are wrong--would you want a world in which you had no free choice to do them or even think them?

All of us wandering about with smiles pasted on our faces, no free will to choose good or evil, no free will to do wrong (or in a sense, to do right, because it really couldn't exist without the potential to do wrong). Is that what you want? And yes, I do think it's either-or, no middle ground. If God is to allow free will, He must also allow evil, and if He allows evil, then Nazis are possible, and if they are possible, they will almost certainly come about. But what God has done throughout history is to turn evil to good--the return of His people to the Holy Land, for example, would not have come about 50 some years ago but for the Holocaust; as crazy as that sounds, it's true.

But if you're going to blame God for allowing evil--even Treblinka or Dachau or Buchenwald or Auschwitz--you might as well understand the consequences of such a world, because if God does not allow evil, He does not allow free choice, and that includes your choice.

One who blames God or says He couldn't exist because evil exists isn't a realist, they're an escapist, because they ignore our part in evil.

 

little fauss,

I utterly reject any such defense of the Christian (or traditional Jewish, for that matter) God. I reject equally any such God that requires such horror to be. Yes, requires...an inevitable conclusion from the idea of all-powerful, all knowing, and everywhere present.

Anyway, there's really not much point in debating the matter. The Shoah (much more accurate word than Holocaust) is the Problem of Evil writ large in bloody letters. Wiser heads than yours or mine have beaten themselves up over it; the Shoah is just one of the more recent, and more horrible, practical examples.

Still, a man of faith must somehow come to terms with it; I respect you for not ignoring the problem.

Besides, aren't we a LITTLE off subject, here?