Yeah, not only does shit happen, sometimes amazing shit happens. The amazing shit in question is this post by Big Dave, on whose unprotected dome have I poured unrelenting ridicule for lo these many years.
Dave’s column, titled “The Meritocracy Is Ripping America Apart”, subtitled “How savage exclusion tears the social fabric”, is, mercifully, not another diatribe/savage satire on the Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford industrial complex. It does start off that way, but then thankfully takes a detour to discuss Arizona State University:
You don’t have to travel far to get outside the exclusive meritocracy. For example, last spring I spent a few days at Arizona State University, which is led by Michael Crow. A.S.U. defines itself not by how many people it can exclude but by how many it can include. The need for higher education is greater than ever, so A.S.U. has rapidly expanded to meet that need. Between 2013 and 2018, undergraduate enrollment rose by 45 percent. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of engineering students grew to 22,400 from about 6,400.
A.S.U. has done it by increasing its reach into those who are underserved. The number of first-generation students has more than quadrupled since 2002.
Dave even—and you really have to brace yourself for this one—gets off a funny:
Everything is on a mass scale. A.S.U.’s honors college alone is bigger than Stanford’s entire undergraduate enrollment. It graduates more Jews than Brandeis and more Muslims than Jews.
Ba-da-bing, eh, motherfucker? Not bad for America’s leading intellectual marshmallow, and not bad for the home state of Donald Trump’s favorite racist totalitarian thug with a badge, Joe Arpaio.
It would be nice to hear a little more about how A.S.U. is graduating all those Jews and Muslims, but Dave’s little piece prompted me to think about another interesting article I’ve read recently, at Bloomberg, “How David Swensen Made Yale Fabulously Rich”. According to Bloomberg, thanks to Swenson, Yale’s endowment has swelled from $1 billion in 1985 to $29.4 billion today. It’s an interesting read, but more interesting is what Yale could and should do with all that cash.
One possibility is simply to massively expand Yale into a mega-university. According to Wikipedia, Yale has about 6,000 undergraduates. Well, why not 12,000, or even 24,000? Doubling the class size would still leave Yale as one of the most selective schools in the country, but of course that won’t happen. Yalies, or Old Blues, or Old Elis, of whatever they call themselves, would object furiously to any dilution of the Yale brand. To be less snooty than Harvard would be unendurable.
So what could be done to avoid pissing off all those prima donnas? Instead of simply providing full scholarships to the handful of low-income students with both the brains and compulsive competitiveness to get into Yale, aka “charity”, how about throwing some of that cash into a “real” online university, however that would work, an online university that could graduate a meaningful percentage of students with a meaningful education, an undergraduate degree that would be recognized by mainline graduate schools? Sure, there would be lots of snickers about “Yale Lite”, but if a Yale Lite degree for one tenth of the cost of a “real” Yale degree could get you into grad school at Ohio State, that would be accepted in the job market as the equivalent of an undergrad degree from Ohio State, wouldn’t that be worth doing?
According to Wikipedia, the Yale library has 15 million volumes. How about putting all of them not under copyright online in connection with the “Yale Online” program, with a sophisticated, user-friendly search engine for anyone to use? Okay, that’s enough. Anyone smart enough to turn $1 billion into $29.4 billion should be able to come up with some more.
He certainly surprised me, thanks