Whatever becomes of the Minerva Project, you have to give the big names behind it credit for aiming high (at least with its rhetoric, which is the only way to judge it thus far).
An entrepreneur who created the photo-sharing site Snapfish -- backed by a star-studded list of advisers (including Larry Summers) and a $25 million investment from a leading venture capital firm -- announced a plan Tuesday with a not-so-modest goal: creating "the first elite American university to be launched in a century."
The project is relatively skimpy on details at this stage, but a few of the new institution's broadly drawn characteristics -- for-profit; purely online instruction -- might make many observers skeptical of its eventual success...
