I'm absolutely no fan of Musk. What's in question here, though, is not him running the education system, but him endowing a private school/university. That's a venerable tradition; a great many US private schools, colleges and universities bear the names of their tycoon donors, people who often are forgotten except in the names of the schools they launched. Not many people today know much about Leland Stanford, Elihu Yale, or John and Moses Brown, though Andrew Carnegie and John and Andrew Mellon may be slightly better known. If anything, I'd take it - cautiously - as a positive sign, that one of our contemporary tycoons might actually launch a project for the common good like that.
"Cautiously," though, because I don't have a whole lot of confidence in Musk to carry this off well. He may be good at tech and entrepreneurship; that doesn't make him good at everything, and he doesn't seem the type to really grasp what's needed for a great educational institution. The same attitude that makes a tech innovator successful, the conviction that their doodad is the "wave of the future" and breaking the mold of existing ways of doing things, can also lead to a very narrow-minded focus on their own preoccupations, and difficulty taking into account the rich diversity of views, experiences, methodologies and disciplines that make for a thriving learning community. The whole concept of the term "university" is precisely that universality - that it brings together in one institution so many different pursuits and approaches.
I cringe a little at the prospect of STEM-focused schools like the primary/secondary school that's reportedly supposed to grow into a university here. Two reasons for the cringe; one is that I'm an historian and narrow-minded obsession with STEM education can undercut valuable humanities education, that IMO are absolutely essential to cultivating a lifelong learning attitude and general humane understanding of life.
The other is that, when I was in grad school, I taught Latin in a charter school (this was early 2000s). I believed in the vision of that school and in the potential of the charter school movement to improve education with greater flexibility and variety. However, when I learned more about how the movement was actually playing out, I became more skeptical. An overwhelming proportion of the schools were sponsored by tech companies, and - surprise surprise - dedicated to the premise that what students needed was MORE TECH! in their learning. These tech charter schools (which I think were something like 80-90% of the institutions founded) hired fewer teachers and bought more computers and software than conventional schools, with NO actual evidence that this was a formula that led to better-educated students. The whole thing began to smell to me like a scheme to funnel taxpayer dollars into captive markets for the tech companies' products.
All in all, there's too little information to be able to tell what the prospects are for this new project of Musk's. It could be a useless vanity institution, it could be a for-profit scam passing itself off as a school, it could be a high- but narrow-minded vision that won't deliver what Musk imagines it will, it could be an odd little niche of the American education world that does its niche thing just fine, or it could actually become a meaningful and viable institution of learning. Wait and see.
