Why George Mason excels (not just the basketball team)
Boettke and Tabarrok:
A few years ago I was involved with the UNCG business school doing this and that. One of the higher-ups told a group of us that his goal was to get UNCG into the top twenty of the US News rankings These are the best of the best - Sloan, Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Tuck, Darden and on and on. He called it a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal).
Somewhat regrettably (somewhat not) this is when I checked out. This goal completely demotivated me. First, rankings are incidental. Go do something great and if it's great, you'll be recognized.
Second, Wake had just started promoting Babcock heavily. UNCG wasn't even the best business school in the Triad. Why worry about US News? Yeah, sure, you have to dream big and all that, but don't be a dumb ass.
This is...the idea behind GMU's free-market-oriented economics department. The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it? GMU knew it couldn't afford to be a first-class MIT and didn't want to be a second-class MIT, so successive chairs of the department, backed by entrepreneurial university presidents George Johnson and Alan Merten, looked for unexploited opportunities.
James Buchanan, GMU's first Nobel Prize winner, has never had an Ivy League position and indeed he has never taught above the Mason-Dixon Line. Gordon Tullock, a potential future Nobelist, has no degree in economics and took only one class in the subject. Vernon Smith, who moved his team from the University of Arizona (again, no Harvard) to GMU in 2001, had to fight to get people to treat experimental economics as more than a cute parlor game.
A few years ago I was involved with the UNCG business school doing this and that. One of the higher-ups told a group of us that his goal was to get UNCG into the top twenty of the US News rankings These are the best of the best - Sloan, Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Tuck, Darden and on and on. He called it a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal).
Somewhat regrettably (somewhat not) this is when I checked out. This goal completely demotivated me. First, rankings are incidental. Go do something great and if it's great, you'll be recognized.
Second, Wake had just started promoting Babcock heavily. UNCG wasn't even the best business school in the Triad. Why worry about US News? Yeah, sure, you have to dream big and all that, but don't be a dumb ass.
Posted by David on
March 29, 2006
In 25 years when I'm looking back at my kids' education I won't be concerned about test scores but about critical and logical thinking, about expression (verbal and written and musical and visual), about mathematical and scientific and technical expertise, about being prepared to contribute to society and make a living. Multiple-guess bubble tests measure little of that and don't measure any of it well.
Will any candidates to be the new ABSS chief be wise enough to exploit the inefficiencies? If so, will they even get an interview? I'm afraid I already know the answer.
Hence another beautiful argument for charter schools.
If only.