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How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 199
of a fraudulent institution. He reacted the way you might expect and
demanded an explanation. I asked him if he thought the average stu-
dent attending the University of Illinois was going there because she
figured after graduation she would be able to get a job.
He agreed.
I then asked whether job skills were in fact taught to the majority
of students there and whether the faculty, by and large, actually had
ever worked anyplace but a university.
He laughed.
It is OK that Yale hires only intellectuals and only the best of the
best because Yale is not a state-run institution and Yale can do what it
wants. No one is making anyone go to Yale. Caveat emptor.
But a state spending a great deal of money on its flagship educa-
tional institution ought to know what it is getting.
This is what it is getting—Yale.
There are no faculty members at the University of Illinois in any
mainstream department (I don’t mean agriculture, for example) who
do not consider themselves the equal of, and in some cases better
than, their Yale colleagues.
When I went to Northwestern, I was given the right to hire a va-
riety of faculty in a number of disciplines that related to learning.
When you recruit faculty, you mostly consider how your institution
might look better to someone at another institution. So, Northwestern
doesn’t recruit from Harvard or MIT (or Yale!) very often because Chi-
cago doesn’t seem a more appealing place than Boston to an academic
and Northwestern isn’t a step up. And, Northwestern doesn’t recruit
from California in general, for the same reason.
So, it’s the University of [linois!
I recruited heavily from [linois because Chicago looks more ap-
pealing than Champaign-Urbana to most people, so I had something
to offer, and the faculty there had already bought into the idea of liv-
ing in the Midwest. Moreover, in the academic world, the University
of Illinois is considered to a top-ranked institution with a faculty every
bit as good as Yale’s, maybe better in some departments.
So, why is this bad?
It is bad for the students of the state of Illinois who worked hard
to get into the state’s best university only to discover that its faculty
think they are at Yale.
Of course, they know they are not at Yale, but they are compet-
ing in that world nevertheless. They also do research and publish and
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