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...
In this blog, I continue to write about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity, and humans. Of particular interest to me are human self-delusions and mad stampedes to nowhere.