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New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 99
No. Of course not. If your child gets into Yale, send her there. It is
a great place. But you should know what Yale actually has to offer and
what it doesn’t.
If your child wants to be a professor, Yale is the place.
If your child wants to be an intellectual, Yale is the place.
If your child wants to go to law school, Yale is the place.
If your child wants to hobnob with the best and brightest, Yale is
the place.
If your child wants to have a fun time for 4 years, Yale is the
place.
Then what is wrong?
There is a problem only if you think that there is a different reason
to go to college than the reasons I have listed above.
Oh. There is this other problem. Many of the other 3,000 colleges
are trying very hard to imitate Yale. They attempt to provide similar
experiences and they can’t pull it off. Yale is a unique place. The na-
tion can afford only so many unique places, however. We cannot af-
ford having the main university of a state thinking it is Yale, as my
state university friend suggests. If every university has as its main fo-
cus research and not education, then the best and brightest of each
state will be trained, not necessarily willingly, to be academics rather
than practitioners. There will be a great many students who came to
school for an education that will help them in their future lives who
will be disappointed to find out that that is not the type of education
being offered.
Professors at Yale are playing the prestige game. Unfortunately,
they are hardly alone in this.
My state university professor again:
We definitely want to be part of the superstar system but we have
no superstars. If we had them, we would probably lose them to
Harvard and Yale anyway. Nevertheless, we are obsessed with
the National Rankings put out by places like U.S. News and World
Report. Faculty and deans say they are not obsessed with them,
but rankings are an important part of the evaluation process and
shape a department’s growth. We want to be in the top 4 or 5
universities. We are not but that’s what we want to be.
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