I'm a CS major at Yale right now. In my opinion, this whole issue has arisen because there is confusion about what "computer science" should be at a university

I'm a CS major at Yale right now. In my opinion, this whole issue has arisen because there is confusion about what "computer science" should be at a university. Theoretical computer science that professors do is a world away from the casual HTML/CSS development that many non-CS-majors want to dabble in after watching The Social Network. I think an excellent university should have instruction in both, and enough professors to strongly support the latter. The Yale CS department, with good reason, does not want Yale to become a "Java school". (good background on the topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...). They want to focus on CS fundamentals, algorithms, and UNIX skills, which are timeless skills that can serve as a foundation for a career in computer science. This especially makes sense given the strength of the theoretical component of Yale's CS department, both now and historically. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis) (http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/ http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/) But the university also needs to realize that having a more casual computer science class for non-majors, like Harvard's CS50, is an essential part of offering a liberal arts education in the modern world. There's a lot of student spirit and initiative here, such as awesome student-taught web dev courses (http://hackyale.com/ http://hackyale.com/) and student-organized talks and hackathons, but the university itself seems to be playing catch-up.