Posted on 08/04/2024 3:26:45 PM PDT by karpov
Derek Bok has served as president of Harvard twice, from 1971 to 1991 and again from 2006-07. He has written much about higher education and is by no means a reflexive defender of the status quo—see, for example, his The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges, which I reviewed here.
Bok’s latest book is Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong—and Right—About America’s Leading Universities. He explains that his motivation for it was the absence of response from our “elite” higher-education institutions to the surge in criticism from both sides of our political divide. As his subtitle suggests, he thinks that much of the criticism is weak, but not all of it. Since many will read the book (or at least its title) and say, “Bravo to Bok for answering those pesky critics,” let’s see how well he’s done.
First, Bok ruminates about what it means to be an “elite” college or university and whether the nation benefits from having them. The elite schools, he says, are distinctive by virtue of admitting only a small percentage of their applicants (they’re selective), because they employ professors with stellar reputations (on the basis of having published lots of books), and because they have high rankings in the places that purport to tell us which schools are best.
Fine, but does this “eliteness” necessarily lead to excellent education? Later in the book, Bok admits that there are reasons to doubt that.
More significantly, is it good for the U.S. to have such colleges and universities?
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
The “elite” universities are hedge funds with classrooms attached.
The elites have become the new aristocracy with the same level of the French nobility just prior to the French Revolution, they are useless and heartlessly evil all rolled up into incompetency
Modern “elite” American universities are ideological factories for young skulls full-of-mush. Both my wife and I went to eastern snob-schools but NONE of my kids will. Anything more than a 2 year degree is a waste of time and a waste of BIG money. Definitely an avoid!
In other words, they are woke enough for publishers to give them a good star for being good little indoctrinating professors.
The only reason to go to an elite college is to make connections to other people, who have or will have access to the elite positions in society.
For the most part, the level of learning is probably pretty indistinct between the colleges these days.
You suck. Not weak.
Why attend a high priced DEI mill?
Peer review has created a system where a bunch of clowns using big words receive huge government grants to spew out lies confirming the lies of other clowns using big words.
Shut it all down—and give every white person in America the proceeds of the endowments as reparations for sixty years of anti-white hate and discrimination against white people.
I like Adam Smith on the subject. He said, “The average university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection, after they have been hunted out of every other corner of the world.”
This guy must be 100 years old by now. He’s been around forever.
no no no, ELITISTS...
Yep, I agree. College is what you make of it.
We only judge you by your results. We see nothing elite. We see the well connected buying access at the blob. You used to be elite, now you aren’t. The hardest part is getting in, the actual education is better at a decent land grants school in Texas or the Midwest, Colorado school of mines, New Mexico tech. I have seen the products that come out of those places. Prove me wrong
You get grants no matter what your "publish" record is.
And their "peer-reviewed" journals are a bad joke.
“Beware those scientific studies—most are wrong, researcher warns”
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-beware-scientific-studiesmost-wrong.html
“So much for ‘peer review’ — Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers”
Have graduates from “elite” universities produced anything? Really. Who do you call at 4 am when your toilet backs up or when your car breaks down on the freeway? The last person I want to call when I am in distress is a Hahvahd graduate. And as a business owner, I would NEVER hire one of those idiots.
I went to a local city college then a lesser known state college. None of the professors or administrators were as stupid, corrupt, or perjured themselves like the C U Next Tuesdays at Harvard. I even had the pleasure of having Victor Davis Hanson as a History prof at Fresno State. I would NEVER hire a brainwashed useful idiot from an ‘elite’ college.
Agreed. They have billions of endowments. Harvard has over 50 billion. The “elite schools” are anywhere from there to 10 billion. Their endowment management team might be larger than the math and science departments.
Don’t go overboard. Do you use Amazon? Jeff Bezos of Princeton built it. Colleges are not intended to teach plumbing or auto repair, although those are important trades. A good liberal arts education can benefit the student and society. It’s a problem that fewer schools are providing one.
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