Our universities exist to educate and separate. Education is essentially a process of separation. Ignorance is separated and eliminated through insight. Students willing to submit to the process of an education should have the opportunity. This is a social obligation,…
H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man, Griffin, demonstrated the chimera of ultimate transparency in his novella of 1897. Over and over we see leaders, in universities specifically but in corporate and public life generally, who act as though they can control which…
Unbridled, ill-conceived, or poorly implemented regulation often creates undesirable outcomes. Legislators refer to such results as unintended consequences. Sometimes, such consequences are the result of well-meant actions, imposed by parties unfamiliar with the underlying complexity of a situation. When assumptions…
There is a shameful trend in higher education and other quarters of society that treats success as something to be considered with suspicion. Some accuse The Occupy Wall Street crowd of holding this position, but achievement and greed are not…
States universities should revisit the history of Performance-Based Funding of higher education. A uniform approach will not work well. Instead, there must be as many performance models as there are universities in a state. While attainable, this is an especially…
Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times Opinionator online July 11, 2011, comments extensively on the relationship of tenure, academic freedom, and current university life in response to a book by Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled, “The Faculty Lounges: And…
Universities must compete for students through excellence and quality. There is no substitute for competition in creating excellence, and it should be the highest priority for any institution of higher education. Governments cannot make universities by enactments of laws: Nor…
A shared vision for a university energizes people. Students must be partners in that vision casting process because theirs is the most fundamental experience that defines whether we have succeeded as an educational institution, and, more importantly to institutions in…
