<p>Again, what nonsense, this time on Siserune’s part:</p>
<p>Caveat: I sought out small classes with good professors and, tried to build meaningful relationships and, my sense is that in the sciences classes can be larger.</p>
<p>However, discussions over coffee - going out for dinner with profs and, being very close with them was the rule rather than the exception for most folks in my little corner of libarts land</p>
<p>I’m an infrequent visitor and don’t know the Siserune-Modestmelody history. (Is Siserune an alumnus?)
Yeah, Modestmelody is (explicitly) a roving Internet advocate, and god love him.
Without Modestmelody Brown would be the most stereotyped university in America.
The Internet determines reality. Consequently, Modestmelody is the most important person in the world to Brown and deserves an honorary degree and a salary.
Seriously.
HOWEVER, Brown was indisputably a better place fifteen or twenty years ago.
The things that make it worse in 2009 than it was in 1989 are identifiable and even quantifiable, starting with the QUANTITY of undergraduates – 6100 instead of a natural 4800 or so.
Brown needs to lose 1000 undergrads, its cookie-cutter registration system, the present Dean of the College, and a number of expensive projects on the sciences side.
President Simmons and her rubber-stamp Corporation had better downsize, re-Magazinerize, and re-focus Brown toward the liberal arts side or it will soon be ranked 18th, then 23rd, then 28th.
It is now easier to do a GISP at Harvard than at Brown.
Thank you for that, President Simmons.
There is NO MONEY at Brown to run all the institutes and science plants and affirmative action programs that Simmons dreams up in her sleep.
There was only ever the leveraging of the Magaziner curriculum to compose that famous undergraduate student body of 1978 to 1998.
Lose that student body, that buzz, that applicant pool, that campus culture, and you lose Brown.
And it IS lost.
A second-rate bio-medical racket won’t save it. A second-rate medical faculty in the most corrupt practitioner state in the country won’t save it.
The humanities faculty is now so underpaid and so second-rate that its members are GRATEFUL to have been hired into the Ivy League at all, can’t believe their luck, and dare not raise their voices in protest against the evisceration of the “Brown Curriculum.”
The current less-than-top-drawer undergrads are also grateful to have gotten into the Ivy League at all, have no historical memory, and do not raise their voices in protest.
(“But Princeton Review says we’re the happiest.”)
Gutless Corporation. Gutless faculty. Innocent students.
There’s a T-shirt for sale in the Brown store: “Harvard – because not everybody gets into Brown.” It dates from the 1980s when, incredibly, it was accurate.
Ancient history
Embarrassing.<br>
We want our old university back.
We want Brown 1985.
We want that student body – liveliest in the country.
We want a competitively paid humanities faculty.
That should be Modestmelody’s agenda.
Go get 'em, Modestmelody.</p>
<p>I actually agree with some of that, jimson. Although – the number should be 5150 undergraduates. There was a study done in the 1970s that recommended 5150 as the right number of students. It became a sort of mantra at the time.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with a lot of what Jimson said, I think there is a fair amount of exaggeration in that post. Actually, the faculty at Brown has greatly improved in that time period (it was largely static pre-Ruth Simmons but the last five years have seen a lot of new people being brought in and most of the “old guard” will tell you they are largely of a higher caliber than the generation before them). The student body is also “improved” as our selectivity has dropped precipitously recently, outpacing peers. GISPs are not that hard to do – I sat on the CCC where GISPs and ISPs get approved. The shift in behavior at Brown with GISPs has more to do with the popularization of a backdoor which is easier than that the process itself is too hard.</p>
<p>That being said, the student body is complacent though, we do probably have 1000 too many students, the expansion in the sciences was extremely necessary, however, if the focus goes beyond keeping us competitive (which is about where we are right now) then we’re probably chasing after a mirage, etc etc.</p>
<p>If you want to know what I think Brown needs to do, just read this article I co-wrote in the post last year (here is the issue, the article is on pages 4 and 5):</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“Post4 23 09 | PDF | Jazz | University”>Post4 23 09 | PDF | Jazz | University]POST4.23.09[/url</a>]</p>
<p>Modestmelody said:
“I don’t agree with a lot of what Jimson said, I think there is a fair amount of exaggeration in that post … The student body is also ‘improved’ as our selectivity has dropped precipitously recently.” </p>
<p>Actually, no.
Jimsonweed IS occasionally hyperbolic, but Jimsonweed also knows, from his ancient perspective, how far Brown’s selectivity has fallen in the last ten years.
No present member of the faculty who was here in the '80s will gainsay the oft-muttered remark that “those amazing student bodies are long forever.”
That is the bottom line and that is the Simmons disaster, her terrible miscalculation.
In the mid-1990s, going by the well-edited Fiske Guide (far more seriously edited than the Princeton Review, and I have corresponded with the Fiskes, father and daughter), Brown was in the core overlap pools of nearly all the most selective universities and liberal arts colleges.
Over the past ten or fifteen years we have watched those overlaps fall away, one by one.
This year Harvard at last fell away – having hung around longer (with Yale) owing to geographical proximity.
In April, when Brown competes head to head for common admits, the yield is now a dismal 40 percent (dismal compared to 20 years ago). The full-year aggregate is 54 percent, but April is 40 percent.
Historically for Brown that is dismal.
And it gets worse. Only about half that 40 percent yield is there by choice. The other half is there by default: its first choice (Harvard), or even first and second choices (Harvard and Columbia) rejected it.
So only about one in five of the springtime admits to Brown wanted it most.
From the mid-1980s to mid-1990s Brown won the April battle with MIT. Yes, MIT. Now it’s a wash in favor of MIT. We used to cream Columbia and Penn. No longer.
We’re now losing significant percentages to Wash U and Tufts. WASH U AND TUFTS!
Tell that to a 1985 applicant and they won’t believe you.
As for the notion that the faculty is getting better, that’s the usual student overestimation of the wider-world reputation of his faculty.
The truth is to be found in the high profile faculty departures since Simmons’s arrival – in History, Classics, Am Civ, Math, Public Policy, Bio Med, Poli Sci, Theatre.
It’s not the kind of thing faculty will talk to students about, but morale is very low.
Believe it.
The faculty wants the Brown Curriculum back too. Its an issue of professional amour propre. THe faculty used to be able to say, I’m paid crap and the facilities are crap, but I’m teaching the best student body in the country.
Not true any more.</p>
<p>Almost nothing you’re writing jives with anything I’ve heard on campus, from professors who have been at Brown since the 60s to administrators and admissions folks. We’re still losing consistently cross-admit battles only with 7 or 8 schools nationwide, our battle with MIT has never been in our favor in the sciences, and most of the changes in cross-admits and increases in applicants come from a totally different application landscape. Several blogs (most notably Washington Monthly’s college guide and some of the Inside Higher Ed blogs) have been writing about how people are making statistically poor implications similar to a few in your post based on the false premise that the applicant pool applying to colleges hasn’t drastically changed, in SES and in geography (the latter actually being most important for a school ike Brown).</p>
<p>Brown’s yield is near-best in the country, and we lose most of the cross-admit because a school like HYP can offer more aid in the 80k-150k a year families than we can. This is a huge part of the gap. Having been at Brown more recently than you, having worked with professors from both the older and newer generation, I can tell you that pessimism, where it exists, is not in the areas you suggest. I hear constant excitement about the student body’s ability, and little lamenting for students of the 80s. I hear people say that students are more interested in accountability and recognition than in the past, more likely to seek double concentrations because they’re looking for a leg-up on the competition and that we’re more stressed, but I also often hear we’re smarter, and especially in the sciences, doing a far better job attracting talented students.</p>
<p>A huge number of students who end up at Brown right now are there because it was their first or second choice. To suggest otherwise is to be way out of touch with current students. Also, Wash U and Tufts are not stealing students… I don’t know where you’re pulling that out.</p>
<p>As for faculty quality, I could make a ton of points here but for once I’ll let USNews do the job for me-- academics nationwide are rating Brown better now than at the start of Ruth’s tenure. It’s very hard to shift the PA score and Brown has moved up recently to 4.4 that just eeks us out of the top 10. That’s remarkable for a school that is small, has far less penetration nationally than many of our peers, and is far less research-based than most of our peers.</p>
<p>I spend every day with faculty, sometimes on university committees where the most engaged faculty are taking part in active service to the Brown community. I spent time talking to faculty about what has and hasn’t changed at Brown and thinking about where we want to go in preparation for that article I posted in the previous post. I know you’re firm in your perception, but quite honestly, the nostalgia factor and idealization of the past in your ideas run quite a bit past the reality on the ground.</p>
<p>Such long-winded posts. Are either of you heading for academia? </p>
<p>jimsonweed’s post can basically be summarized with his/her discomfort that there is no longer a gap between Brown and other top universities. </p>
<p>Rather than criticize Brown for what it is supposedly doing wrong, it would be more seemly to congratulate universities like WUStL and Duke for matching Brown in quality and resources.</p>
<p>Jimson is right. </p>
<p>There were a number of faculty and students who fought the good fight preventing more damage. I like to consider myself one of them. It was telling when some moron on student government told me I was too passionate about the issue to play a role. </p>
<p>Brown is a great place, but, it is a school transitioning from that Brown of the 80s/90s to something more akin to UPenn’s gaming the system via USN. In that process, the unique intangibles and institutional memory are losing steam which explains the extreme UH turnover.</p>
<p>In my time there, we fought off some terrible ideas but, the administrivia simply don’t understand or respect in a meaningful way that the curriculum is an empowerment to risk-taking. Not a sop. And, that some risks pan out better than others.</p>
<p>How many of Brown’s administrators went to Brown? Far fewer than used to be the case</p>
<p>I am one of the few Ruth Simmons (Harvard) and Lassonde (Yale) critics on this point. They are raising the academic bar and lowering the creative bar. The balance between representing an orientation to risk-taking.</p>
<p>Credit where credit due though: Ruth made it possible for B to go need-blind and more though. Something the school doubted it could do in the not so distant past.</p>
<p>I am not a fan of either Simmons or Lassonde (though Lassonde I know only passively). Simmons, however, has done a ton to make the university a far better place, way more than she has to make things “worse”. As someone who is now around post-Boldy Brown I can tell you that PAE is slowing, and not just due to the economy but because it’s already reached it’s fundamental goals. The administration, now at Brown for at least a few years, is far more cautious about making certain moves students were really unhappy with 3-4 years ago and have rolled back quite a bit, IMO.</p>
<p>The fear, I think, comes due to how quick most of the PAE was done which made things look very different. But now with the economic slow down and simply less things on Brown’s plate, the university has returned a bit to normalcy and is far better for it. The early part of Ruth’s tenure marked a rapid shift at Brown from the attitude that we’re too small to do certain things so we should just not try to if it needs to be done we will find the money for it. Brown used to rest on the excellence of its student body more than it does now, which is why the decline in faculty quality argument is hilarious. Both are faculty and facilities have been greatly improved in the last ten years. Unfortunately, in both cases, this only catches Brown up. Our facilities were way behind, especially in the sciences, and our faculty was too small for the expansion to 6k students. Now that we’re the “right” size with the faculty (very few new positions remain from PAE), and we’re back to a facilities level that does not hamper work, we need to look toward the next ten years where we begin to exceed rather than catch up.</p>
<p>I don’t see any change in risk-taking, creativity, or leadership since 2005. I haven’t seen any changes in course-taking patterns and registration post-Banner after a few key changes were implemented to the override process and professors had more time to learn how caps and prerequisites were now designed and enforced. Fredmurtz left Brown at a time where I truly believe we were at the edge of a slippery slope, but having two more years at Brown now I can say I have observed us backing off that slope.</p>
<p>Student government is still moronic, but student representatives continue to be well-informed and deeply involved in every level of decision-making. Don’t talk to UCS to find out what’s going on, talk to URC reps, CCC reps, BUCC reps, etc.</p>