Opinion piece on Yale vs. Illinois teaching culture

200 Teaching Minds work hard to be famous superstars. They are in exactly the same game as their Yale counterparts, so it follows that they don’t want to teach either. But the numbers are much bigger at Illinois. Classes are larger and faculty have to teach more classes. So these same people, who would readily move to an institution that didn’t treat them like this, are stuck competing with their Yale colleagues and, at the same time, having so many more undergraduates to deal with. Guess who loses? And, I haven’t even started to discuss the idea that most students at Illinois do not go there to become professors or intellectuals, or hobnob with the best and brightest. The faculty think they are (or ought to be) at Yale, but the students do not. The students want to get jobs 4 years later. Good luck with that. That is not what Yale is for. I was told that explicitly one day, by the way. I had to give a short talk to entering freshmen at Yale when I was the department chair. The idea was to extol the virtues of majoring in the field represented by the chair. Each chair gave a short speech. Mine, as usual, was the shortest. Major in computer science—get a job. That was my speech. I was booed. I was booed by the freshmen, who by this time at Yale had been there maybe 5 minutes but had already absorbed the zeitgeist of the place. Yale was for thinkers not workers. By the way, that was in 1982 or so. All our computer science gradu- ates went to work at Microsoft in those years. There were lots of million- aire alums not too long after. (Presumably, not those who were booing.) They wouldn’t have booed at Illinois, and that is the point. Yale is not the problem unless you realize that it sets the direction for ev- ery other university in the country. It doesn’t do this by itself and it doesn’t do it intentionally. Nevertheless, it ruins the chances that II- linois graduates will receive a reasonably practical education that actu- ally might get them jobs or teach them how to live in the real world. So, we have created a system that values heavy intellectuals and gives them a place to do their thing. Is this bad? How could it be bad? It certainly isn’t bad for the intellectuals. But it is bad for the students. Not necessarily for the students at Yale, although there are certainly unhappy students there. It is bad for the society at large. Students don’t need to major in subjects unless they intend to become profes- sionals in those subjects. Actually, they need to intend to be profes- sional researchers in those subjects, since the faculty really don’t know HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023946