"With lab courses, we may be able to simulate a lot of that and reduce costs"
About this Quote
“Simulate” is doing the real political work here: it sounds like innovation, but it also smuggles in substitution. Roy Romer isn’t marveling at new teaching tools as much as he’s telegraphing an austerity logic with a friendly interface. The sentence is built as a soft sell. “May be able to” cushions the claim against backlash from educators who know that labs aren’t just content delivery; they’re supervised chaos, expensive equipment, safety protocols, and the embodied learning that happens when something actually breaks.
As a politician, Romer is speaking in the dialect of budgets. “Reduce costs” is the explicit goal; simulation is the instrument that lets cost-cutting pose as modernization rather than retrenchment. The subtext is a familiar public-sector bargain: if you can reframe a cut as efficiency, you can do it with fewer enemies. There’s also a quiet promise to taxpayers and administrators: we can expand access without expanding spending. That promise is seductive in an era where higher education is pressured to scale like a tech company while still claiming the prestige of apprenticeship.
Contextually, the line lands in the long shift toward digital and hybrid learning, where the rhetoric of “innovation” often precedes labor changes: fewer lab sections, larger enrollments, more adjunct dependence, less physical infrastructure. Romer’s phrasing invites a pragmatic question that never quite gets asked in the sentence itself: simulate what, exactly? The procedures, maybe. The unpredictability, mentorship, and tactile competence that labs certify? Harder. The quote works because it frames a trade-off as a win-win, and politics loves a bargain that doesn’t name what’s being given up.
As a politician, Romer is speaking in the dialect of budgets. “Reduce costs” is the explicit goal; simulation is the instrument that lets cost-cutting pose as modernization rather than retrenchment. The subtext is a familiar public-sector bargain: if you can reframe a cut as efficiency, you can do it with fewer enemies. There’s also a quiet promise to taxpayers and administrators: we can expand access without expanding spending. That promise is seductive in an era where higher education is pressured to scale like a tech company while still claiming the prestige of apprenticeship.
Contextually, the line lands in the long shift toward digital and hybrid learning, where the rhetoric of “innovation” often precedes labor changes: fewer lab sections, larger enrollments, more adjunct dependence, less physical infrastructure. Romer’s phrasing invites a pragmatic question that never quite gets asked in the sentence itself: simulate what, exactly? The procedures, maybe. The unpredictability, mentorship, and tactile competence that labs certify? Harder. The quote works because it frames a trade-off as a win-win, and politics loves a bargain that doesn’t name what’s being given up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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