Jesus Christ, I’m at Yale

“Unlike a regular teaching strike, the grade strike held the university hostage to a ‘terroristic act,’ in the words of another professor. … One didn’t argue with terrorists; one defeated them.”

In other news: “Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the strategy ‘paper terrorism.’ ”

Maybe we need a fresh implementation of Godwin’s Law, to the point that any disruptive activity will the characterized as “terrorism”, and therefore discussion is closed and they deserve what they get.

First thing I thought of when finishing this post: “Saigon….shit, I’m only still in Saigon.”

More seriously, I think the point Corey makes about the faculty’s relationship to an institution (at least at a place like Yale) is really important. I was a grad student at Princeton during the late ’80s and early-mid ’90s. And I was at that AHA Business Meeting in which Nancy Cott unconvincingly denounced the unionization efforts at Yale and attempted to defend the university’s (and most faculty’s) response to it. At the time, while I wasn’t surprised at the Yale administration’s response, I was shocked at the faculty’s. I really shouldn’t have been.

Incidentally (at the risk of blog-whoring), it’s precisely incidents like the faculty response to the Yale grade strike that made me praise Jeff Williams’s review of Neil Gross’s book on the political views of professors, while at the same time trying to press Williamson (and others of like mind) to continue to pay attention to the actual political self-understandings of professors. (My initial post led to an exchange with Williams. For the few who might be interested in all this, it can be found here.) Among the things I like about Corey’s post is it does just this, i.e. it tries to delineate what might lead a particular group of faculty, many of whom consider themselves to be liberal / progressive, to behave in ways that might seem at odds with those political commitments.

He asked me what I was doing at Yale, how I was finding the students, where did I live, what exactly did I do. His response to each of my repIies was impeccable: “Really. How interesting! Now that’s a novel idea. Never thought of it quite like that. I must say, you’ve got a point there.” Yet, the quality of this exchange was, rather remarkable: seamless and airless, as though words were passing mysteriously through a smooth unbroken surface, impenetrable for human contact.

I need to learn this language so people will give me money.

“I need to learn this language so people will give me money.”

Honestly, simply learning the phrase ‘Give me money. I have a gun.’ is a lot easier, a lot quicker, and, in the long term, a lot less demeaning. Probably less effective though.

The final link does not work (for me, anyway).

I get a msg from google-books: You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.

I dropped out because there was no intellectual excitement.

That is a really excellent article. Cheers.

(A shame that The Nation doesn’t curate its archives better (or at all). There’ve got to be so many gems in there.)

To clarify, I can see how something like that can survive into the 70s, but I’m really surprised that it continues today.

But if you’ve been at Yale for, say, 20 or even 10 years, would you still say “Jesus Christ, I’m at Yale”? I don’t think so. It’s now your baseline situation, taken for granted, nothing to get excited about.

Nozick talked about that in Anarchy, State, and Utopia: when a high school kid gets admitted to Harvard, he’s thrilled to be a Harvard student. But once he gets there, everyone’s a Harvard student, so it’s nothing special. Likewise Robert Frank in Choosing the Right Pond: it’s your local community that matters for the comparisons that ground your self-esteem, not anything wider. And if your local community is all Yale faculty, being Yale faculty is nothing to be thrilled by.

So I don’t buy the Ruth Richards explanation, which isn’t to say Yale faculty in the 1970s weren’t insufferable.

@Main Street Muse
I’m listening to it.
They never ask whether their conservatism is academically sustainable or not.

Sounds like Cambridge.

I stick my head out into the crazy heat of the Tokyo summer, quickly retreat to my air conditioned office and scream “Jesus Christ, I’m in Tokyo.”

(Fortunately, Tokyo’s OK the rest of the year.)

The only Yale student I ever met was a grad student enrolled at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. I sat next to him on a flight from Philadelphia to Seattle. As we were crossing the Cascade Mountains, he looked down and saw all the big ugly clear-cuts. He had never seen even a photograph of clear-cuts before. He was amazed at how awful they looked. I wondered what kind of requirements a student had to fulfill to be admitted to Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Given all the stereotyping and generalizing, which I am about to add to, I want to preface my own Yale story with a disclaimer: I knew some wonderful people when I was a grad student there, and I know some wonderful recent graduates (from Yale College) as well.

But still.

I worked as student help at alumni weekend in 1975, the 25th reunion year of the biggest class in Yale history (because of the GI bill). William F. Buckley was in that class, and my friends and I caught sight of him now and then in the sea of blue-shirted, silver-haired guys milling around the Old Campus. (Yes, guys. I suppose there were some wives around too, but it’s the blue polo shirts that stick in the memory. Yale didn’t admit its first women undergrads until 1969; two of my sixty or so female freshman classmates left MIT for Yale that year.)

Though I’ve always “remembered” that Buckley was running for the Senate in 1975, a quick web search tells me that it was his brother Jim; Bill was only campaigning. Still, my overwhelming impression of that weekend was of a bunch of guys all looking like they were running for the Senate.

By coincidence, a week or two later I was visiting friends at MIT during alumni weekend — also mostly guys in that era (though MIT had a few women right from the start), red the predominant color instead of blue. And — a very strong and concentrated gut feeling of the difference between the two places.

My simple-minded caricature of that difference, though it applies more to the Yale undergrads I knew than to the grad students, is that what people most want to do is beat the other guy in an argument, to show themselves to be cleverer and more dominant. The “truth” doesn’t matter. (Much less, as I quoted in a recent thread, the pursuit of truth in the company of friends.) People were like shiny baubles: bright on the outside, but you could never penetrate the surface to find out what was really there on the inside.

The corresponding caricature of MIT is that if you’re going to build a bridge it had damned well better support the weight. There’s a groundedness to the place that I felt was completely missing at Yale.

In fairness, I wasn’t in a science or engineering department at Yale, so maybe I just missed it. Also in fairness, there’s a lot of a different kind of arrogance at MIT, and my feelings about the place have never been unmixed.

But I have to admit, every now and then I think “Maybe if I was at Yale, I wouldn’t care about the weather”

Having spent quite some time in the region, I assure you that this would not be the case, especially if you were coming from Australia. There are some lovely things about New England, but the weather for 3/4 of the year is not one of them.

“There are some lovely things about New England, but the weather for 3/4 of the year is not one of them.”

Strongly disagree. The weather is lovely about 1/2 the year: spring and fall. The summer and winter just _seem_ longer.

Yes, spring and fall are nice, but alas, spring only lasts about three weeks and fall about six weeks. Still, there’s a couple of nice weeks in summer too.

Long time lurker lured in by the references to MIT and Yale. I went to MIT for undergrad (chemistry) and then Yale for graduate school (biochemistry) in the 1990s. I agree with JanieM. Compared with Yalies, MIT undergrads had a humility and a groundedness that could be summed up as: “No matter what happens, we’re all still nerds.” Looking at today’s students, I wonder if that humility has been exploded by the rise of tech entrepreneurship.

Looking at today’s students, I wonder if that humility has been exploded by the rise of tech entrepreneurship.

Good point. Entrepreneurship has probably replaced finance as the peak aspiration by now.

As to the humility: I don’t know. There was always arrogance mixed in with the humility, tho maybe the balances are changing. When I was an undergrad I quoted an inside-MIT joke to some friends from home: that the initials stood for “Mighty Intelligent Tool” (tool being campus slang, more or less the same meaning as “nerd” — someone who studied too much). My friends from home of course didn’t get the inside-joke, self-mocking aspect of “tool” — they were just outraged at the arrogance of “mighty intelligent.”

That isn’t a dig at Janie, BTW. I just don’t know anyone in any context who went to Yale.

JanieM at 29: One of my own private sanity-maintaining jokes about Yale while I was there was that everyone woke up in the morning and said, “Jesus Christ, I’m still not at Harvard?”

I admit this made me laugh. Is that sort of sentiment *really* still in play?

New England winter is quite nice if you really, really like winter. Persistent snow cover!

I suspect that elite school identification is strongest for the bottom end of an elite school class. “Well, I do have a C average at M.I.T., but M.I.T. is hard, and that puts me above the best of state school.” (I’m not sure anyone has a C average at Yale.)

The Gornick piece is amazing and well captures the tweedy clubbiness that made me (like most other new faculty) feel so out of place when I first arrived to teach at a small New England college in the 1970’s. (Hey, JanieM, I too started college in fall ’68!) Nominally WASP though I am (more of the NYC area kind, with some midwest and southern background thrown in, than the New England kind), and after 8 years of college and grad school in the upper midwest (go blue and all that), I remember being struck by the realization in my first semester, “Ah, so this is what people really mean by ‘WASP!'” Most of the tenured professors in those days had their Ph.D.’s from the Ivies, especially Yale and Harvard. Many the Gornick-like tales I could tell from those days.

On the other hand, many of those same professors were the men who had eagerly approved, in the 1960’s, abolishing fraternities and hiring Jews and Roman Catholics for the first time (how quickly we forget!), and, in the 1970’s, going coed, expanding minority enrollments, and hiring not only women and blacks for the first time but Ph.D.’s from a much broader spectrum of programs than the Ivies’ (or MIT). Many of these tweedy, clubby men had fought in WWII (and a few in the Korean war) and had supported, even worked actively in, the Civil Rights movement. In other words, this generation may have been more complicated (and interesting) than the Gornick essay suggests. Perhaps some pre-selection was at work in the sample from Yale that Gornick reports on, since she mentions that most of the fellows never showed up to the weekly drinks-and-dinners (-and-poker-games) she describes.

John Q @38, Yale as an undergraduate college was men only until around 1970, during a period when many formerly all-male (and all-female) schools were going co-ed and distinctions between the Ivies and the Seven Sisters were collapsing. With co-education came the first serious hiring of women faculty at these schools. Amherst College (one of the “little Ivies”) has been documenting the early years of women faculty there, e.g.:
https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/colloquia/women_teaching/arrivals/node/348868
Cornell may be the Ivy with the best record on women in graduate school in the old days. I think Brown’s may have been pretty good, too. But the greatest opportunities for women (such as they were) were to be found chiefly in the many colleges and universities founded later than the Ivies, after the Civil War, or at places like NYU (as opposed to, say, Columbia).

@parsimon — Up to now my comments have been lighthearted, but the city comparisons and questions of poverty and crime don’t lend themselves to the same kind of joking around, and I’m not really the one to try to answer your questions as framed anyhow.

Still, just briefly: Cambridge and New Haven are not very comparable. Perhaps most importantly, Cambridge is adjacent to Boston and as such is part of a huge metropolitan area in which there are dozens of colleges and universities and hundreds if not thousands of cultural and entertainment venues. New Haven doesn’t have a Boston to enrich it; it is, in fact, itself the hub of a bunch of smaller towns/suburbs.

Cambridge would certainly not have a subway system if it were a standalone city. New Haven has bus service. I don’t know how good it is, but I don’t think physical accessibility is what sets Yale apart in the first place, so I suspect the quality of the bus service isn’t all that relevant.

Other people who have spent more time than I have in New Haven, and more recently, may have more to say.

Cambridge is also a tourist/nightlife attraction for people from Boston and the surrounding area. That’s mostly true of the Harvard area, but in the past twenty years it’s been increasingly true of the MIT area, too. (That’s certainly not true of Columbia, where people go to the more exciting parts of New York for fun (especially since the drinking age was raised to 21, when that doesn’t result in people holing up in their rooms with a half-case of vodka). I’m not sure whether it’s true of Yale or, say, Penn.)

Hey, JanieM, I too started college in fall ’68!

I’ve picked up on that before and wondered if it might be fun to get together sometime when I’m in Cambridge. But I gather that you’re not actually in the Boston area, and I don’t usually have a car for out of town excursions when I’m there. Still, if you’re ever interested, we could try to figure it out.

Never knowingly met a Yalie, but the smoothly amoral guys from the three letter agencies in a lot of US thrillers are mostly from Yale.

JQ @37

Just to repeat an old theme, this is an instance of something that stunned me when I discovered it. The Ivies are teaching no more undergrads now than in the 1950s, and they are more than ever drawn from the top of the income distribution. Both a cause and an instance of rising inequality, even at the very top of the scale.

There is, of course, a very high degree of economic inequality in the U.S., but I think its causes/sources do not match up *quite* as neatly with educational backgrounds as JQ believes. I don’t intend to get into a prolonged argument about this, partly because, based on my rather vague recollection of the last time this issue came up here, I suspect the data needed to resolve the question conclusively are not available, although they might be and perhaps someone has already done the research. (In any case it’s the sort of thing which people are convinced they “know” and minds are unlikely to be changed one way or the other.)

@LFC – I think the argument is less about the economic elites, which are slightly broader, but about power elites.
All of the SCOTUS justices have at least one Ivy degree. All presidents since G. HW. Bush had at least one Ivy degree, and the only two presidential candidates without an ivy degree – Bob Dole and John McCain – were old and had a military background.
If you look at major figures in this and the last administration, you’ll find very few people who didn’t go to a super-elite university (Ivies, Stanford, U Chicago).
The institutions of institutionalized wealth – investment banking, consulting – also recruit almost exclusively from a small club of elite schools.
I think there are still some areas where to become super rich without an elite university degree (tech, tort lawyers, eg.) but they require a lot more luck.

bob benzon @57 (or rather, Mark Twain) also omits the inconvenience of the power outages that routinely accompany ice storms.
All four of New England’s seasons (summer, fall, winter, and mud) are maybe the best thing about the region, especially as you go north and/or inland. Also, too, lilacs thrive in frozen-earth winters, and roses and many perennials appreciate the cooler summers. Beautiful as the flower gardens are, it’s the trees. Beautiful trees. (They’re the right height, and more.)

1. FWIW, somewhere on these here internets is an interview with J Hillis Miller where he talks about getting recruited to Yale from Johns Hopkins in the early 1970s. He also talks about what an intellectual backwater Harvard English was in the 1950s when he got his degree there. Judging from what my teacher, Dave Hays, told me about Social Relations there, THAT department was considerably better than English. But it broke up into, I believe, a psych dept. and a sociology dept.

2. When I was getting my degree in English at SUNY Buffalo in the 70s the folks there thought of Harvard English as worthless. Yale, with the deconstructive mafia, was rather better.

3. I was secretary of the Tudor and Stuart Club at Johns Hopkins in the late 60s and into the early 70s. T&S was the local literary society & open to both the Arts & Sciences school (at Homewood in North Baltimore) and the Medical School (in East Baltimore). Meetings were held monthly during the school year on the Homewood campus with presentations alternating between Homewood and the Medical School. As secretary I bought the cold cuts and tobacco for the meetings and got to have dinner with the evening’s guest in the faculty club. Those meetings were considerably livelier than the one Gornik described and the conversation was frequently intellectual and interesting. Of course, we also talked trash and got drunk. Sexism, I’m sure, was rampant.

I have to concede that Brisbane is famous for electrical storms, often leading to lengthy blackouts (though that’s more a function of market-oriented electricity reform – they sacked most of the maintenance crews then had to hire them back as contractors). It’s describe here as “Xanadu for intrepid storm chasers and ground zero for floods, supercells, tropical cyclones and other aberrant weather activity. ”

http://www.hotelclub.com/blog/best-places-to-see-mother-nature-in-action/

But at least it all happens in summer, so the worst you get is that the beer gets warm if the power stays off too long. That, and floods.

Why this talk of ice-storms? It’s August still. Let us enjoy the tomatoes and corn and such while they are with us! (We New Englanders have to remind ourselves to enjoy the present, so busy are we preparing for those ice-storms. The Yale world, another aspect of New England, plays the same game, maybe, but somehow differently. Attend.)

Bill, who ever heard of lacrosse till recently? (Not to knock it.) Jazz has a longer history.

Orioles are indeed pretty birds, beautiful birds. I can remember my father’s excitement when some made their way to NJ when I was a child. (He was born in Minnesota and raise in Montana. Go figure.)

I was a PhD student at Yale (actually, in the year Gornick’s essay is set), and can attest to the fact that yep, things were pretty much the way she describes. My department had two women on the faculty (out of a total of ca. 20), neither of whom was granted tenure – as Meredith notes, the system, such as it was, foresaw “6 +3” and then out for assistants. (A couple of them ended up at Michigan btw, much to their own, and Michigan’s, benefit.) I could have written an essasy similar to Gornick’s about being a female PhD student during those years, but the whole experience depresses me so much even today that I don’t think I could put fingers to keyboard.

As a poor girl from the Midwest, I had attended a college fair in 1970, where Yale was represented by the Richest Banker in Our Town, and whose reaction when my parents and I approached him about my candidacy was to more or less turn his back on all three of us. That was my first experience of what it meant to be a Yale alumnus, and honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t learn my lesson then.

The department at the Big 10 flagship school I eventually took my BA from was staffed with alot of men from Harvard and Yale who were still waking up every day and saying, “How’d I end up HERE?”, but they were excellent and demanding classroom teachers. We also had a number of refugees from Germany/Central Europe who were nearing the end of the careers but were still Pretty Famous. All in all, I have to say that I received a really excellent undergrad education in that department, where I also did an MA and where my husband did his PhD.

Child #1, against my advice, decided he wanted the Ivy experience and went to Princeton. I think he fared better there than I did at Yale, partly because Princeton is a genuine college town, whereas New Haven as I recall it was Yale surrounded by slums (in the 70s) – I found it frightening.

Child #2 attended one of those small liberal arts colleges Dsquared referred to in an earlier post, one that began as a progressive religious college in the 1840s and has ended up as a respected preparatory program for scientists. She was happy pretty much throughout her four years there, had great teachers, spent 20-30 hours in the lab each week during her junior and senior years, and her thesis director was genuinely involved with her work. So, go figure.

Meredith: I think we’re in the same field, and nearly the same age. I’m in NYC regularly to visit Child #2 …

Jesus Christ. I’m in Brisbane

The word “bloody” should be appearing in that sentence at least once, and probably twice.

@dsquared. Quite right. There are two proper nouns “Christ” and “Brisbane”, so normal usage would require two “bloody’s” . However, some speakers such as my former colleague Peter “Bloody” Core would add phatic uses, to make four, as in

Er, bloody … Jesus Bloody Christ. I’m, bloody, in bloody Brisbane

But in written Australian, this can be bloody well assumed and doesn’t need to be spelt out.

While we all having fun kicking poor Yale, I would like to say one (just one) thing in its defense. Of three graduate programs I know something about there (East Asian Studies, Computer Science, and Biology (more on this later)) all are very concerned that they actually function as programs and that their students actually finish their degrees. At MIT, you are on your own. Science (the AAAS house rag) had a long article on a biology program at Yale and followed 36 incoming students. The article was negative, muttering that since only 2 or 3 of these kiddies made it into tenure track positions, it was failing. Sheesh, what insane inanity. Of the 36 who came in, 34 got their PhD. That’s friggin’ amazing. Bloody amazing, if you need it in Australian. Really. Sheesh. Getting a PhD is a big f’ing deal (it requires, at an absolute minimum, way more energy/motivation and way more willingness to put up with BS than I could come up with), and getting almost 95% of your incoming kiddies a degree is ineffably wonderful beyond words. GO, YALE!

But to get back to kicking Yale, the then president and a large cohort of academics and assundry other low-lifes did a multi-country dog-and-pony show tour plugging Yale that made it to Japan. I went to one of the events, and one of the said low-lifes was a hot-shot in the Yale music program, who was some sort of amazing European pianist/composer. The bloke barely spoke English, my impression being that the heavy accent was, if not affected, then at least intentionally retained. So to make small talk, I asked him if Yale music was doing anything with jazz. He turned up his nose, snorted a haughty “no”, and shuffled off. Sheesh, what an idiot. (OK, I think less of contemporary classical music than he does of jazz, but I actually know both, and jazz is doing better job at carrying on the common practice period intellectual tradition (music theory) than the classical types are.)

adam.smith @60
Yes to a significant extent, but even the ‘power elites’ are not *quite* so narrowly recruited. (E.g. the congressional leadership. E.g. the current vice president.) Anyway this subject is tangential to the thread, so I’m going to drop it.

@79
Your comment, in a nutshell, is exactly what’s so screwed up about the President’s plan of handing out aid based on graduation rates.

Now every student can enjoy the grade inflation and pass-rates previously reserved only for “student” athletes.

Echoing dbk’s story of the Rich Banker: one of the colleges I applied to was Cornell. My pediatrician had gone there, and when he asked where I was applying and heard that Cornell was on the list, he said, in a cautionary and superior tone: “Oh, you have to be really smart to go there.”

My mother was pleased when, a few months later, she got a chance to tell him that I had been admitted to Cornell but was going elsewhere.

he spent the first three weeks of this graduate seminar dictating bibliography

That’s funny. It puts a memory in perspective for me, which is that I audited Harold Bloom’s class on the Romantic poets and was amazed that in the first class session he talked non-stop for an hour and a half, and the entire content of the monologue was a list of all the titles one would have to read in order to “come to terms with the Romantic poets.”

First thing I thought of when finishing this post: “Saigon….shit, I’m only still in Saigon.”

Point: Martin Sheen’s character is probably thinking both “…shit, I’m only still in Saigon” and also “…shit, I’m still a Green Beret”.

I audited Harold Bloom’s class on the Romantic poets and was amazed that in the first class session he talked non-stop for an hour and a half, and the entire content of the monologue was a list of all the titles one would have to read in order to “come to terms with the Romantic poets.”

You see, if you make them pay for photocopies they’ll just use the students to replicate documents….

more broadly, for me it was “Shit! Royal Holloway! How am I going to explain this on the Internet in 13 years’ time?”

I’ll stick to my 1/4 of the year position regarding New England weather; spring and fall are absolutely lovely, but each lasts about six weeks. The rest of the time is either too cold or too hot and humid. But of course, Slavic surname notwithstanding, I grew up in California, so perhaps it’s totally unreasonable for me to expect the weather of any other place in the US to live up to that standard. Spoiled, I am.

In related news, Go Bears! As an undergrad, I frequently had those “Jesus Christ, I’m at Berkeley!” moments, although to be fair, not all of them were a consequence of the excellent education I received there. Let’s say half.

Meredith –
Funny you should mention Shackleton Bailey. He was at Harvard when I was there getting my bachelor’s in Classics, and moved to Michigan the same year I entered the Ph.D. program in Classical Studies there, where I took his seminar on Housman’s edition of Manilius. Coming in my first year after undergrad, that was a challenge. From what I understand, he enjoyed spending his final years there.

As pleasant as it is in Ann Arbor, a major drawback for many academics is the more difficult path to having alcohol at department functions – that’s another difference between private and public institutions.

And the grad student strikes continued at UMich every few years after the union was established. Faculty in the department, from what I remember, tolerated these, but a number were very hostile. And still are, I’m sure.

Don’t know nothing about the Ivy League, so have nothing to add except a vague sense that academic pretension seems much the same on the A&M circuit as has been reported here about Yale. Deciding whether or not there’s equal justification for it is as much a matter of the number on your lottery ticket, I suppose, as the power of your intellect.

As for the Jesus Christ, I’m still in (fill in the blank) competition, I’d offer Arizona. The politics you know about, and you’ve probably heard about the weather too, which has got to be at least as bad (without the bloodys) as Brisbane — the high temperature on my front porch last year was 111 degrees F, and the low 12 degrees F. Almost daily power outages are a feature of our summer monsoon season as well. And despite what you may have heard, we do indeed have Spring and Fall, but they’re even shorter in duration than geo reports about MA.

On the upside, being here for a decade may be sufficient expiation for the sins of my past life to win me an exemption from the eternal Hell we’ve all heard so much about. So I’m not complaining. Really I’m not. As has been written, Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof….

pedant asks:

“Are you sure you want to give a graduate program points for getting most of its students through the PhD?”

Yes. I’ve been in a lot of graduate programs. It’s a different world from undergraduate education. The density of real losers is quite low. And even some number of losers can be taught how to do real research. These are people who have already demonstrated a reasonable level of academic achievement, the flakes have been self-selected out by messing up at undergraduate level. Not completely, of course, but it really is different world. And it is a high faculty/student ratio situation. Sure, there are some losers (more like 10% than 5%, IMHO), but just because it’s graduate school and we’re doing you a favor letting you be here at all doesn’t mean that the school doesn’t have a responsibility to at least try to teach.

Are you sure you want to give a graduate program points for getting most of its students through the PhD?

Usually, yes. As David J. Littleboy notes, the major weeding out is supposed to have occurred prior to being accepted to graduate school. A grad program with high attrition either needs to tighten up its admissions process, or is a school that uses a lot of teaching assistants. (One unnamed big public research university of my acquaintance had a stretch where admission to PhD candidacy in physics ran under fifty percent, as the number of actual faculty-supported research slots was much smaller than the number of TA positions.)

Now, a separate question is whether a present-day graduate program is doing anyone any favors by turning out yet more PhDs, but again, that should be handled at the enrollment stage.

@parsimon — Is that sort of sentiment *really* still in play?

What I really should have done in response to this question was to ask a question in turn: Do you really think human nature has changed since whatever past time your “still” refers to?

Or just repeat myself.

“…in the first class session he talked non-stop for an hour and a half…”

So, when I was an undergraduate I somehow got the idea that graduate seminars would have a lot of discussion among the students and between students and professor. When I got into graduate school (English at SUNY Buffalo during its glory years in the 1970s) I found out that that wasn’t the case. Yes, the classes WERE small. But the prof still lectured.

How typical is this?

JanieM at 100: What I really should have done in response to this question was to ask a question in turn: Do you really think human nature has changed since whatever past time your “still” refers to?

This is a really strange, difficult, confusing question. I meant to ask nothing more than whether Yale’s apparent envy of and resentment toward Harvard was still so strong. That’s the “sort of sentiment still in play” that I referred to. It was a sincere question: I don’t know Yale.

You’ve turned it to a completely different question, judging from the thread and comment you link. Of course people are snobbish, and will remain so.

parsimon — I didn’t turn it into a completely different question on purpose; I thought that was the question. You didn’t, after all, clarify, until just now. I don’t say this with unfriendliness, just to try to clarify in my turn.

As I said, I don’t know Yale either after all these years, and of course I saw it through my own filters even when I was there. But your specific question and my general question don’t seem as distinct to me as they apparently do to you. That’s okay too, as far as I’m concerned.

Comity. I remain a bit confused, but I haven’t read the full thread.

Also, for good or ill, in Econ.

Speaking of Yale and Harvard, during the 1988 Presidential election campaign George H.W. Bush disparaged Michael Dukakis as having gone to liberal Harvard, as opposed to conservative Yale, Bush’s alma mater.

It was soon remarked that Dukakis, having only been to Harvard Law School, not the College, was no more a Harvard man than someone who puts a Yale lock on his bicycle is a Yale man.

Meanwhile, one of those ranking thingies has come out, Academic Ranking of World Universities 2013, and Harvard is number 1, followed by Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Cambridge. What I don’t understand, though, is the listing at that link references this page, World University Rankings 2012-2013, where the ordering is slightly different, bith Cal Tech # 1, the Oxford, then Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. Is the ranking so volatile that we’re seeing stochastic jitter in the webtubes?

Oh, all is explained. In the prose at the first link we find that “the table is based on six, largely research-based, measures.” Whereas the rankings in that second link “employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.” That explains it. Thirteen beats six any time.

David J. Littleboy 08.27.13 at 2:56 am
” I have no problem with cranking out PhDs in STEM fields. There’s lots of fun jobs outside academia for such folks.”

Barista, waiter, ….

Tabasco @111
The bigger question though is not why the Ivies have not increased the number of students they teach but why no more Ivy-quality universities have emerged.

My impression is that there are a whole bunch of univs. of roughly comparable quality, certainly when it comes to quality of undergrad education. There’s no quality gap of any significance betw the Ivy League and those others (which wd include some liberal arts colleges and some larger institutions). There may be in some cases a prestige gap, but prestige and quality are two different things.

The bigger question though is not why the Ivies have not increased the number of students they teach but why no more Ivy-quality universities have emerged.

As others have noted, the big advantage of the Ivies isn’t quality of education but access to the old boys network.

The archipelago of SLACs in New England and down into New York provide excellent educational quality, but they don’t open doors on Wall Street the same way that a Harvard or Yale degree will.

surprised only one person (Matt @59) has mentioned money

I think it was Galbraith who 1st remarked that harvard paid 2x yale, who paid 2x anyone else in the country, which is why when harvard called, people came (cf CREF/carnegie cause teachers weren’t able to retire)

You visit a campus like Yale or Princeton or Harvard etc, and it couldn’t scream WE ARE STINKING RICH any louder then if the buildings had roofs covered with gold.

Or, if you are a hot young STEM PhD looking for a tenure track job, two things you need are sharp students and startup funds. Endowments certainly make a difference in the latter.

As the story goes, Nobel Laureate Weinberg, Harvard Prof in Physics, was lured to UT Austin with all sorts of inducements – huge salary (reportedly, Weinberg demanded he be the highest paid faculty member), etc etc.
Prof Weinberg, on arriving on Campus, discovered he was the second highest paid faculty: the football coach was number one

JanieM, yes, but not before ‘every last cent of their money was spent’. Give it a couple of decades!

novakant @ 125: Because they don’t have many schools in the top 30? But they have lots in the top 100. Does anyone in continental Europe have the kind of endowment of a Harvard or a Yale? I don’t think so. The US invests a ton of money in their premier institutions (and this is practice is pretty dubious since those are already some of the most advantaged students). But the top schools from France, Germany and elsewhere are ranking right around the better state schools. That isn’t so astonishing. Population wise, France is closer to the size of CA than the size of the entire US. I don’t know enough about all these schools to say whether these rankings are absurd or not (rankings are kind of ridiculous anyhow), but the Euro/US distribution is not obviously ridiculous.

Mpowell, neither the money nor the population argument makes any sense, but that is just as well because, as you say yourself, the rankings are ridiculous.

A handful of elite jobs are confined to products of the Ivies, but the real divide is between the flagships and the rest. IIRC, virtually everyone in Congress has a 4-year flagship degree or higher.

I just remembered a story my dad told me when I was a wee nipper, a story I didn’t appreciate for many years:
In the early 1950s, when my dad was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, the SENIOR poetry prize was a 25$ gift certificate to the campus bookstore.
At Yale, the Junior prize was a years fellowship in europe

‘The question is why no new ones have emerged in, say, the last 40 years.”

This stasis is US-specific. Many other countries (Australia, for example) have seen a big expansion in the number of universities since WWII. That includes ANU, UNSW and Monash, all of which are reasonably high on world rankings now. The post-1960 institutions are generally lower status, but the hierarchy is not as steep as in the US.

Funny, I was trying to do some internet research on the enrollment question — I wasn’t fully persuaded by claims that there has been no expansion in enrollments at the more “elite” colleges and universities — and I formed the impression that JQ reports @129: dramatic increases between 1960 and 1980, then leveling off. (Which might also have something to do with baby booms and such, then with Reagan years and decreased support for public education, not to mention the growth of for-profits.) But I also came away from my mini-foray into research humbled by how complex this question really is. It’s harder to track enrollments than one might think, especially at universities (even the Ivies), what with their many different schools and divisions and extension schools and certificate programs, each with full-time and part-time students, and so on.

A few other random complicators, even for straightforward four-year undergraduate programs: female applicants, whether only becoming eligible for admission since the ’70’s or simply applying in greater numbers since then, have created more competition for male applicants; also, the competition created by Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and even ethnic groups like Italians and Irish applicants, all of whom make for less room for previously privileged groups (anecdote: the Italian-Americans I grew up with in ’50’s and 60’s NJ would never consider going to college far from home; hence, Stevens rather than MIT, even if they had a real shot at the latter). Also, less admission by elite private schools of under-qualified alumni children and, more recently, much emphasis on admitting first-generation college students. All this increases competition for a limited number of places, especially at more “selective” institutions.

At some point, a college cannot expand undergraduate enrollments any further and continue the things it does that attract students to it and serve its particular mission – even a relatively large, private college like Harvard or Yale. As a result, a lot of qualified students just won’t get into their first choice of college, small or large, and even if it’s public.

Creating more private colleges and universities: as LFC observes, where’s the Carnegie-esque money for it? Well, there have been some new Christian-right creations…. There’s also been NYU’s story — not a role model. Solutions lie in public education.

I am not sure that the expansion of the public systems since 1980 has been so very limited. The U of Michigan, the U of Massachusetts and the state college system in MA, and the NJ system have certainly expanded enrollments. Extension campuses (e.g., U of Mich. at Dearborn) need to be taken into account here, as do state colleges and the community college system. At the same time, many state universities and colleges have tried to serve the aspirations of the more dedicated and talented students in their midst by developing honors programs and the like (e.g., special residential colleges within), or by developing specialized state colleges (e.g., some dedicated to a traditional liberal arts education, some to the arts, some to technical training…). Smart and dedicated professors (and yes, administrators!) have been very busy doing good things.

A long distance now from the OP, perhaps, but I don’t think (nor do I think most CT’ers would think) that the undeserved advantages conferred by a Yale or Harvard, once or still, matter as much in the big picture (to which comments have opened) as do the underfunding of public higher education, whether tax payers’ support has been withdrawn from students (via higher tuitions leading to burdensome loans) or from faculty (too many adjuncts, too few tenure-track positions, usually crappy salaries all ’round). And also to worry about: the whole business-driven, assessments and outcomes incursion on colleges, especially public ones.

@Meredith, 136: …dramatic increases [in enrollment] between 1960 and 1980, then leveling off. (Which might also have something to do with baby booms and such, then with Reagan years and decreased support for public education, not to mention the growth of for-profits.)

Well, yes, baby booms, but also post-Sputnik tech panic. The Russians beat us (us = Team USA) into space and now we’ve got to play catch-up ball. So the Federal government poured a lot of money into higher education and lots of schools expanded on it. And that expansion was at the graduate as well as undergraduate level. After all, if you’re going to teach more undergraduates, you have to expand the faculty to do so. [I believe Hillis Miller mentions all those graduate fellowships in that interview I linked somewhere up there.] But that Federal money dried up starting, I believe, in the late 1970s.

As for those rankings, I don’t know quite what to make of them. In the first place, I don’t know how they were determined. That aside, I’m strongly attracted to the view that, yes, they’re ridiculous. Still, they’re not nothing.

But what I really want to note is that, in the overall context of this discussion, we need to calibrate them against the OP. No doubt Gornik was making a specific case against Yale and I’m sure there were better things going on even at Yale at the time. Still, it’s not a ridiculous shot across the bow of elite education and research. There’s a lot of time-serving going on, even at the top of those rankings.

Now, these days, something called “digital humanities” is hot hot hot. Seems that the deans have gotten word that there’s gold in them thar hills, so they’re all over it. But though I think the moniker “digit humanities” is unfortunate, I also think so good to fascinating work is being done there. (I’ve got some remarks on that in this working paper: Corpus Linguistics for the Humanist: Notes of an Old Hand on Encountering New Tech.)

Just where is this work being done? Well, there’s the culturomics folks at Harvard and Moretti’s lab at Stanford, but U. of Nebraska at Lincoln’s been on a hiring spree and has recently hired a half-dozen top people. Nebraska!? Which universe is THAT?

Remember that asteroid that struck the earh 65 million years ago. Before it struck, the dinosaurs were top predators and ruled the earth. Afterward, nada. Who knows, if India can get it together in the next quarter century, maybe it’ll be the center of the intellectual world 50 years from now.

David J. Littleboy — great pictures, and I’ll bet great memories…? At least I hope so.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but Yale is in the process of building two new residential colleges, although the project has been moving slowly.

@Bianca: Cambridge is also a tourist/nightlife attraction for people from Boston and the surrounding area. That’s mostly true of the Harvard area, but in the past twenty years it’s been increasingly true of the MIT area, too.

I’ve had dinner a couple of times this summer near Kendall Square, and one night I took a stroll down Third Street. The change even in the last ten years is unbelievable.

Bennington was not one of the seven sisters, and it never has been comparable to any other college. It went co-ed (started accepting men on a regular basis) around 1970 or so. Since a big, controversial shake up there in the 1990’s, it has been recovering, though I’m not sure how it’s now faring financially or if it has fully recovered its reputation (among those who admired it — it was always controversial).
Many of the innovations Bennington introduced as early as its founding in the 1930’s were later adopted by other colleges, e.g., the idea of a short term between semesters or of including practitioners as well as conventional academics on the faculty. Nowadays, writers and performers and artists regularly hold academic positions at colleges and universities, but even today nobody can match the heyday of tiny Bennington for its distinguished faculty, from Martha Graham to John Gardner to Kenneth Burke to Karl Polyani (not to mention faculty spouses, like Shirley Jackson). Or, considering the size of the student body (I don’t know exact figures — under 1,000, who live and gather in buildings like barns and white clapboard New England houses, along with a couple of great performance buildings, all set in a very Vermont landscape of fields and woods and mountains) for its accomplished alumni in the arts, and few for its accomplished alumni in academics.
Bill benzon, I give every year to the Sage City Symphony (started as a donation in honor of one of those amazing women in the student dean’s office here who really run the college, plus, there’s the violinist in me — thanks for those pictures, David J. Littleboy!), but I have yet to make it to one of their concerts (a bit of a trek). Just to assure you, in case you aren’t aware, that the Sage City Symphony seems to be going strong.
This thread may seem to some to be degenerating into some weird series of personal exchanges that are irrelevant to the OP. But I don’t think so. I think many of the comments are testimony to how quite varied college experiences, and the communities that generated those experiences, profoundly form people, students and faculty (and even the people who work in the dean’s office, the dining halls, facilities…).

It’s not the Ivies but here is a graph of income distribution within the UC system:

http://good-in-theory.tumblr.com/image/17150159706

The data is from FAFSA numbers, and the “unknown” are people who didn’t file FAFSA, who I would reason are typically rather well off.

= = = And one last thing to throw in: the effect of sports on the composition of classes. The Ivies and MIT don’t give athletic scholarships, but the effect of sports on admissions, at least at Harvard, is encapsulated for me by a headline in our local paper in October of the year when my daughter was a senior in high school: “SMITH CHOOSES HARVARD.” (“Smith” is a pseudonym.) Smith was my daughter’s age; they had actually played on the same “travel team” when they were 11-12. She was a good student, yes, but because she had been recruited as an athlete, she was privileged to make a choice amongst her options several months before the deadline when ordinary applications were even due. If every varsity coach gets to pull in a couple of students in that manner, then about 5% of Harvard’s entering class is settled before the game even begins for the rest of the applicants. = = =

Three in my daughter’s graduating class who were fully qualified for MIT. The one who was admitted was a state-qualifying athlete in a NEWMAC sport. If they sponsor intercollegiate sports they play that game, Division III or not.

Cranky

This paper by Caroline Hoxby has a great graph on the inequality in spending on students based on college selectivity. See page 109.

http://collegetransitions.com/theme/default/upload/1/files/hoxby—changing-selectivity-of-u.s.-colleges.pdf

This paper by Caroline Hoxby has a great graph

Wow. Is this a cause or a consequence of the 1% grabbing all the money? Both, I suppose. As a mechanism for self-replicating those at the very top of pile, this is hard to beat.

I thought I’d quote this, which is consistent with my impression @130 above

Hoekstra’s study of a state’s flagship university that has a sharp admissions cut-off based on admissions exam scores. Because students above the cut-off are admitted if they apply, students who are just above the cut-off are much more likely to attend the flagship university than students who are just below the cut-off. The latter group of students are not admitted (just!) and therefore attend less-selective universities. Hoekstra uses administrative records to follow the earnings of people just above and just below the sharp cut-off. He finds an earnings difference that is so high that, even if we assume that the flagship students will have to pay back 100 percent of the larger subsidy they enjoy in college, their rate of return is a bit higher than the long-term return on equities.

John Quiggin 130 & 156

surely this depends on the state. There are some states where the difference between the flagship university and the next best is not that big, either in human capital formation or signalling. Case in point: University of Arizona and Arizona State University.