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 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.