You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality. The tension between those two realities shapes almost every real problem in education today. How do we respect every person’s equal dignity and opportunity while also recognizing and cultivating individual excellence? Nearly every university in America has decided to answer that question by abandoning excellence. Harvard hands out more A’s than any other grade. Yale gives nearly 60 percent of students straight A’s. Princeton no longer requires Greek or Latin to major in the classics. Columbia proudly ditched the SAT. In our leading institutions, honors are handed out like candy while calculus is quietly dropped.
They [educators] don't want to hear my views on education. They just want the [federal] money.
everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.
The attitudes of senators towards the institution and its processes, toward debate and toward one another, have evolved in ways that maximize the convenience of individual senators at the expense of the Senate's business.
The rules are drawn up by lawyers who are trying to protect the admirals and generals from the politicians; they’re not written by people who are worried about the guys on the ground getting shot.
Every year, deans of admissions are pushed: 'Did you increase the number of applicants? Did you decrease the acceptance rate?' And it's an institutional priority for colleges and universities to look for students that are going to have a philanthropic family that could give to that school.
Universities simply unable to play judge, jury and executioner when they're already having trouble playing educator. Resources are limited and colleges must put their focus on their primary objective: education.
It really pains me greatly to hear from graduate students that graduate education is a lower priority here.
