Miami–Dade's Encounter with Technology

Abstract

1 V liami-Dade Junior College the master control room: electronic circuits, monitors, television tape recorders, walla. Four programs, running at once, are being piped to classrooms by closed circuit cables: The Central Nervous System, The Concept of Culture, So That Men Are Free, The Thread of Life. The programs are in living color slide-tapes, films, CBS Reports, the music of Simon and Garfunkel. This, says a technician, a problem of packaging. don't have other stations to compete with, the kid can't flip channels, but we hope to keep him from going to sleep. The talk is about efficiency, inputs, programming, dubs, systems. Miami-Dade, one of those instant colleges, has grown from zero to 25,000 students on two campuses in eight years. Super-pragmatic and super-audacious, it is running ahead of its own institutional identity crisis, testing itself not by grace or elegance, but by numbers and dropouts, by senior college admissions, and by the economic usefulness of its graduates. We're only number two a junior college, says Franklin Bouwsma, the chief guru of hardware. We have to try harder.