How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 185

How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 185 a year (or whatever the tuition was at that time) to attend Yale and he damn well was going to see me. I did in fact see him because he had a point. Professors are hard to find. There are many reasons for this. The first is that if no one makes them see undergraduates, so why should they? The second is that from long experience most professors have come to understand that when an undergraduate wants to see them, there typically is one of two motives. Either the student wants to argue about a grade he or she received, or wants to engage the professor in a conversation whose point is that the undergraduate is really a great guy or gal and will be counting on a recommendation down the road. Neither of these conversations is any too fascinating to professors so they usually make themselves hard to find. The funny part of this story is that the student who was making the fuss had neither of those issues. He was exactly the sort of student professors very much want to see. He wanted to become a professor in my field. This is exactly who a professor wants to meet with. The con- versation with him didn’t start out about that exactly, but it was easy to see that he had real issues he wanted to talk about, science issues, the kind professors wish were on the mind of every undergraduate but rarely are. This student did in fact become a professor, the ultimate suc- cess story for the professor who guided him there. And, no surprise, he treats undergraduates who want to see him the same way I treated him. There is a naive conception on the part of students in a top univer- sity that their needs matter to the professors of that university. But the top universities are not structured in such a way as to reward professors who care deeply about students. If a young assistant professor spends too much time with undergraduates, there usually will be some wiser head who will counsel him against this behavior. Assistant professors must be concerned with getting tenure. Having the students like you has next to nothing to do with tenure at the top universities. No one higher up in the administration of the university cared much about how much I taught. “Why not?” you wonder. To answer this, one has to understand how universities really work, why they work that way, what game they are playing, and who wins and who loses. The answers to these questions, well known by anyone in a top university, are, somehow, completely unknown to the general public. Outsiders don’t ask how Yale works. They ask how they can get their kids into Yale. And therein lies the problem. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023931