flâneur

How to drive a stake through your own good heart

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I was teaching at Columbia last year when the news broke: our esteemed Ivy League university had been lying for years to increase its standing in the US News and World Report college rankings. According to one of its own math professors, Columbia had juiced its stats by, among other things: Claiming that 96.5% of its faculty are full-time, when the real number was probably more like 74% Reporting a 6:1 student-faculty ratio, when the real ratio is between 8:1 and 11:1 Counting the $3.1 billion it spent on patient care at its medical center as spending on "instruction" Those unscrupulous maneuvers were enough to catapult Columbia from #18 to a tie for #2 on the US News list. As an employee of Columbia, I was ashamed. How can you take a school seriously when its own administrators can't uphold the same Honor Code that they make their students sign?1 But as a teacher, I was thrilled, because I had used the US News rankings as an example for this exact problem and now I could gloat in fron

Photo cred: my dad I was teaching at Columbia last year when the news broke: our esteemed Ivy League university had been lying for years to increase its standing in the US News and World Report college rankings. According to one of its own math professors, Columbia had juiced its stats by, among other things: Claiming that 96.5% of its faculty are full-time, when the real number was probably more like 74% Reporting a 6:1 student-faculty ratio, when the real ratio is between 8:1 and 11:1 Counting the $3.1 billion it spent on patient care at its medical center as spending on "instruction"…

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