Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

The transcript :
http://cmu.edu/uls/journeys/randy-pausch/index.html

The talk istself :
http://cmu.edu/uls/journeys/randy-pausch/index.html

Redotted from Sriraman.

Quoted: A nationwide trend for universities to use adjunct professors instead of a tenured faculty has become so extreme that some schools are pulling back... Several studies of individual universities have determined that freshmen taught by many part-timers were more likely to drop out.

Quoted: The lack of tenure can leave adjuncts vulnerable. In a number of cases, professors outside the tenure track have been dropped after run-ins with administrators over everything from grading to opinion articles in newspapers.

Quoted: Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.”

Quoted: “You can’t apply Scripture woodenly,” he says; instead of executing them, “you might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim.” He adds: “There are circumstances in which I’d be in favor of execution for adultery. . . .

Quoted: The result is a school with no academic departments or tenure, and one that emphasizes entrepreneurship and humanities as well as technical education. Its method of instruction has more in common with a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard engineering curriculum.

Quoted: the process of solving seemingly insurmountable problems is an Olin rite of passage, like the project that was given to her and her fellow students: build a robot that can climb a wall. When it worked, she said, “it was the moment of realization that I could do anything.”

Quoted: Lately, MIT has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less ...“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”