LifeItself

In Part I and Part II of this series, I told you how desperately public universities play the U.S. News & World Report rankings game. Public academia appears to be unable to grasp the fact that school rankings are an elaborate scam set up to boost private schools and provide them with steady income and prestige.  This obsession with rankings also plays to the recurrent thinking in the U.S. that unless you are rich or an already highly-educated, ready-to-use immigrant like me, you are not worthy of a decent life and it is your own fault.  Yeah, shame on you, why aren't you rich or well-educated? In Part I and Part II, I also suggested that in undergraduate education public universities would never win or place high in the current rankings scam.  Simply put, the rankings carrot is dangled from much too high for the public universities to bite, no matter how hard they try to jump. Since I spent 18 years as a faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, a...

In Part I , I criticized current framing of disputes about the future of public higher education.  Now it's time for a positive proposal.  I will show you that private and public schools cannot be easily compared and should not be included in the same rankings.  As you will see, these unrealistic rankings compare equivalents of a leisurely weekend runner jogging at 5 miles per hour (private schools) with a hurried man barreling down a freeway sixteen times faster at 90 miles per hour.  It is impossible to apply the same criteria to the behavior and priorities of both. In my mind, current university rankings by the U.S. News and World Report should be soundly repudiated by public universities acting as a group, and a case should be made to split the ranking lists of private and public universities.  I am assuming here that we will continue to insist on numerical measures of academic success, however incomplete and distorted these measures are.  That's beca...

I presume that you already know what engineering and science education should morph into in the near future. After all, the distinguished professors of management and psychology are telling you how research should be divorced from teaching and how good teachers and good researchers should be put into two different academic drawers.  Today, the consensus is to split teaching from research in all disciplines of public academia, thus lowering cost and increasing efficiency.  I find this consensus to be misinformed and potentially harmful to many of the students who will not go to Harvard or Yale to replenish the ranks of our oh-so-smart and so-thoughtful elites. A complete divorce of research and teaching, vigorously pushed by non-scientists (psychologists, economists, political scientists, business majors, and the like), is akin to a religious belief in absolute right and wrong that simply do not obtain in science.  Dr. Isaak Asimov commented on this belief, which is...