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  #1  
Unread 06-04-2022, 10:26 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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My friend who was tenure track at Harvard in the 1990s told me that at Harvard, tenure track faculty traditionally are denied tenure, expected to spread the good word elsewhere while Harvard hires in tenured names from elsewhere. This unorthodox approach has enabled Harvard to crack the top 5 in world rankings, 2022 (they are fifth). Well done, Harvard! Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
John

Last edited by John Isbell; 06-04-2022 at 10:26 AM. Reason: 2022
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  #2  
Unread 06-04-2022, 12:34 PM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Congrats, Shaun.

Golly, John, I didn't know there was an official world ranking of colleges. Is there a jury of dour (but honest) Swedes or Norwegians that decides? Do you get to wear a discrete little pin if you're in the top five. And is this limited to the Classics curriculum, or do Mechanical Engineering and Dentistry have a shot. And if it's "world" rankings how do you compare Todai in Japan, for example. to Harvard? Is there only one officially recognized world ranking or are there hundreds of them? Does having a really good and well-funded football team enter into the determination? And so on. Many questions. Maybe I can get a poem out of this.

Last edited by E. Shaun Russell; 06-08-2022 at 03:15 PM.
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  #3  
Unread 06-04-2022, 03:13 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Hi Michael,

Google is your friend. There are various lists, in none of which does the university which shits on its non-tenured faculty reach #1 at present. I find this mildly funny. Here's one such list: https://www.topuniversities.com/univ...-rankings/2022

Cheers,
John
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  #4  
Unread 06-04-2022, 03:24 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Since there are apparently over 28,000 universities in the world, I hardly think being #5 is a badge of infamy. In fact, it's just plain silly for anyone to think that any university is "better" than any other university just because it is one or two spaces higher up on some ultimately subjective ranking of 28,000 universities worldwide. But if you take special glee in thinking that Harvard has been brutally slapped down because it is rated #5 in the world, then I can only imagine how sad you must be for #14 Yale.

And, of course, this is a ranking of entire universities, not departments within them. MIT is #1, but I imagine that Harvard is probably considered better than MIT for anyone interested in studying the humanities, and of course MIT doesn't even have a law school or a medical school so it's a safe bet that it's not #1 in those categories.

Last edited by Roger Slater; 06-04-2022 at 03:27 PM.
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  #5  
Unread 06-04-2022, 03:40 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Hi Roger,

I'm not sad at all for #14 Yale: #14 is an outstanding result. If you don't shit on your own non-tenured faculty, in which case I'd think the #1 spot matters a good deal.

Cheers,
John
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Unread 06-04-2022, 04:39 PM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Congratulations-in-law, Allen. It the kid is going to save the world, he'd better get a move on. Not much time left.

I've got a problem, John. My college (Cooper Union) doesn't even appear to be listed. Could this relate to the football team problem I raised earlier. We didn't have one. (We didn't have a frisbee team either, but I'm not sure Frisbees were invented yet.) I'd ask for my money back, but the entire student body was on a tuition free scholarship. (Old Peter Cooper had some wonderful and unusual ideas about education - and the money to see them through.)

Last edited by Michael Cantor; 06-04-2022 at 07:39 PM.
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  #7  
Unread 06-04-2022, 06:16 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Congratulations, Allen! Well done to your son-in-law. That's a stressful thing over.

Michael, that is a problem. It evidently means you didn't have an education. Which is weird, because I've heard of Cooper Union. I'm afraid I don't know what to suggest!

Cheers,
John

Update: heard good things! Apologies, I am very dry at times. :-)

Last edited by John Isbell; 06-04-2022 at 06:25 PM. Reason: update
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  #8  
Unread 06-04-2022, 10:15 PM
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RCL RCL is offline
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When professing at UCLA, I found no record of any lecturer ever being raised to a tenure track. I often called attention to that, calling it "the floating bottom." Of course, no one gave a shit.
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Unread 06-05-2022, 12:20 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Hi Ralph,

I think that's a hard nut to crack. Anecdotally, I don't remember it happening either at IU or at UTRGV in my time there. But Harvard is an outlier.

Cheers,
John
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Unread 06-05-2022, 09:58 AM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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I realize that lately, I'm becoming a terrible snob. I've been writing more from my past than I used to and as I write about housing projects and mobile homes and getting welfare food I run the risk of becoming an elitist. I mean, how many of you guys lived in a liquor house and got to stay up all night when you were eight or nine and listen to guys born in the 19th century talk about fighting in World War I as they got drunker and drunker? Top that, Ivy League snobs. Then I read about how Harvard, which has an endowment of what? $5 billion? $6 billion? no longer putting professors on the tenure track, and I realize yet again how twisted it is in the actual elite world and I do feel a little superior. The way I do when I read poems of oppression written by someone who was awarded an undergraduate degree from Smith or Williams and an MFA from Columbia. I guess it is my bias that causes me to see how the further up the economic ladder--and don't fool yourself, it is like everything else in America--it's all money--the more trivial things are. It's like Kissinger saying dealing with the Arabs and the Jews in the Mideast was nothing compared to faculty fights at Harvard, or Kierkegaard talking about the terrible tension of trying to decide between pewter or silver for dinner. I'm not saying it's impossible for someone from the upper reaches to connect to the timeless, only that I have a much better appreciation of the difficulty of doing so than I did when I was a resentful, bullshit Marxist in my land grant school.
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