Once again, today's news has raised to public awareness this University of Minnesota plan to be among the top three. Here are a couple of general arguments about that:
(1) There are some very large, rather old people in the world, with their own research establishments. These people like to take walks with each other. Suppose Albert Einstein invited you for a walk. You'd go. Suppose he said, "Talking to you is so clarifying. Could we meet every Sunday?" You'd clear your schedule to make time. A person in Boston or New York could drive down to Princeton to see Albert, on a Sunday. But a person in Minneapolis could not. There is no cluster of research universities around the University of Minnesota. People at a certain level of sophistication need people of their own kind. And Minnesota surely doesn't have the resources to attract a whole herd of gray haired giants.
(2) Young hot-shots follow money and perks and equipment. But they are also able to move. So there is a competitive market for such people. What reason does anybody have to think that the University of Minnesota is well positioned to win a bidding war? Do we have more donors, or richer donors, or a more open-handed legislature?
(3) Progress at the growing edge of intellectual disciplines depends on the climate of ideas and thinking in the general culture. Feynman happened partly because his father was a good amateur scientist and science teacher, and that happened because science was sexy, in the general world they both lived in. I don't hear about University efforts to raise public consciousness or public excitement about the life of the mind. Instead, the University grows more distant, more elite.
I don't think these arguments lead to despair, because I don't much trust this ambition to be in the top three. I think that any institutional planning that results in a goal that is simply a number -- and a number the meaning of which is controlled by somebody else -- has failed to do its job.
My grandma used to say to my cousin, who was out screaming "Roll over" at the collie, to no effect, "You know, Bob, to teach a dog a trick, you have to be smarter than the dog." My ultimate pessimism about this new vision for the U is somewhere in that territory.
Posted by shea0017 at March 30, 2005 2:21 PM