Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Excellence in all things
Business Week has published its first-ever undergraduate business school rankings and Wharton heads the list. Business Week's print edition rankings have Wharton as academically number 1, with an A+ teaching quality grade. Anyone associated with Wharton will be unsurprised. The faculty there inspire not only their students, but each other. There's remarkably little academic jealousy and petty petulance. These guys are deeply respectful of each other's work and contributions, and they care just as deeply about their students.
I've done the adjunct circuit. From the department chair who advised me to handle the fact that there was insufficient lab space to accomodate all of the students in my class by making lab sessions optional ("That way no one will come") to the adjunct coordinator who suggested that I hold my required office hours in one of the campus cafes to the really absurd, I've seen, if not "it all," at least quite a bit of what's wrong in undergraduate education. I'm in a position to know that Wharton just plain gets it and just plain gets it right.
Even more interesting to me is how much more value Wharton faculty find in the work I've been doing with texts than humanities faculty find in my core IT and teaching competencies. The assumption seems to be that my very affiliation with Wharton must make me a genicidal, WTO-mongering, colonial robber baron--inhabiting the land of the status quo and on the very wrong side of the class struggle and that such an intellect couldn't ever understand poetry or literary theory--that's for the experts.
I'm trying to figure out why they work Wallace Stevens into so many of their discussions of theories of texts and the role of the avant-garde.
# posted by Jim @ 10:41 AM 
