University hiring practices and prestige competition described in internal anecdote

How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 187 however, professors don’t really have bosses in the traditional sense. I remember the provost of a top university complaining to me that with professors everything is a la carte. The provost is the guy who runs the university. What he meant was that he could not ask any professor to do anything without the professor asking what he would get in return. The traditional sense of boss is gone, of course, when the boss can’t fire you. The real bosses in the university system are your colleagues. Huh? Your colleagues can’t fire you. But this is what they can do. In order to hire a new senior faculty member at Yale, we actually had to write letters, at the beginning of the process, to all the important faculty members around the world in the subspecialty in which we wanted to hire, asking them to rank the top ten people in the world in that subspecialty. If the person we wanted was not on that top ten list, we would not be able to hire them without proving why we couldn’t get one of the people in the top ten and why we so desperately needed someone who clearly wasn’t that good. Top universities are caught up in a game they can’t get out of that has two very bad results. The game is the superstar-prestige game. Top universities want to be number one. They want this very badly. Uni- versity administrators worry about this on a daily basis. All hirings revolve around this issue. All professors worry about their status in the academic world at large. It is the coin of the realm in academia. Although it does not obviously follow from this, one effect of this game is less than stellar education for undergraduates. And, in- cidentally, this game also has a disastrous effect on the nation’s high schools. This is not at all obvious to professors and to the universities for whom they work. To understand this, we need to first see what professors do and how they think about what they do. I will start by telling a story about someone I barely know. He is a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Washington, which is in the top tier of state universities. I met him because I was working on creating a high school aerospace curriculum that I hope one day will replace some of what is now in high school for those in- terested in engineering. I asked Boeing to host a meeting to design this curriculum and they agreed. They invited some of their engineers as well as this professor, I brought some of my people, and we began to design a series of projects that would take students with no knowledge HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023933