Monday, June 15, 2009

a working girl's guide to game theory

Mithridates sent me an e-mail in which he mentioned Erving Goffman's book Interaction Ritual, which I haven't read. The Staatsbibliothek didn't have it, but they do have Randall Collins' book Interaction Ritual Chains, and Professor Collins is billed as a sociological hotshot, so I order it. Went up there today to collect.

The reason I was interested is that I thought this might be relevant to my book on sexual codes, which needs a shot in the arm. A while back I tried to explain this book to a philosopher, and what I said was that it was trying to introduce a new kind of speech act to communication of sexual preferences, and I then went into a long narrative on the evolution of whist (in which information about a hand could only be communicated by playing a card) into bridge, in which highly sophisticated bidding systems communicate the shape and strength of hands before a single card is played. The philosopher said something along the lines of, he did not think there was such a thing as a cleanly demarcated speech act. But the hell of it is, the only reason I brought speech acts into the discussion was, I was pretty sure he knew nothing about whist or bridge; I was trying to translate into something he would understand.

Anyway, not sure I can explicate this book properly in blogtime, but I brought RC's book home and was thrilled to find that he actually had a chapter on A Theory of Sexual Interaction. I go straight to the chapter, and um, hm.

RC:

The strongest empirical approximation to sex as selfish, individual pleasure-seeding is prostitution. In the ideal type, there is a simple exchange of customer's money for exual pleasure. I wil suggest the relevance of three kinds of empirical observations.

First: customers' interaction with prostitutes is often difficult and unpleasant, characterized by a high degree of distrust and cheating. Prostitutes are primarily motivated by money: they generally try to get as much money as possible from the customer, and give as little sexual labor in return as the can get away with.... Full-fledged prostitutes engage in various forms of bargaining, both as to price and quantity, such as charging a given sum for initial sex acts and asking for more to continue on to actual intercourse, sometimes stringing out the customer to continued renegotiations of what he thought was a done deal. Prostitutes in arenas with high turnover tend to minimize their work for the money, trying to hurry the customer through as quicklyas possible. In short, a prostitute tends to act very much like a pure utilitarian actor in game theory: since this is a purely selfish exchange on both sides, the focus is on monetary bargaining and on shirking work. [¿K?] Prostitutes almost always demand their money up front, before performing; customers agree to this, apparently because the strength of their desire for sex is stronger than their willingness to calculate and bargain. In other words, the cooler head is on the side of the prostitute, hence the better bargaining position. For the same reason, prostitutes are in a better position to cheat their customers than the other way around. ...

I'm afraid this doesn't leave me with high hopes for the book (I have racked up further credit card debt and ordered Goffman on Amazon). It's actually scary to see this.

(Poor head.)

Look. I went to Smith College in 1975, and my father had to pay fees up front, and the intellectual mediocrity of the place* drove me to my first suicide attempt, and if you think Smith gave my father a refund, well, hey, over the rainbow skies are blue. Someday I'll wish upon a star. In 1978 I took the Oxford entrance exam for classics (8 exams, in fact, 2C2E), got a place, went up in 1979, to be told that overseas fees had been introduced. All fees were to be paid up front. PLUS, my beloved college wanted £1000 up front as a deposit. So then as now, academic institutions had to be paid up front - IT had a piece a while back on students being denied access to course materials because their loans had not come through, plus ça change. OK. But see, the fact that cashstrapped students have to pay up front does not necessarily mean that the people drawing their salaries are actually doing what they are notionally being paid for. So, frinstans...

For Mods, you were supposed to do three special subjects. One of mine was Aristophanic Comedy. My contemporaries at other colleges were getting their tutorials on their special subjects, as well as going to university lectures; my first year went by, and these tutorials had not taken place, so I assumed they would be arranged for the first term of my second year. I went home to the US to grapple with a) reading the whole of Homer in Greek and also reading my three Aristophanes plays and b) holding down an office job, something that could easily be managed by getting up at 5, reading Greek for 3 hours, going to work, coming home, then reading Greek from 6 to midnight. Went back to Oxford. My tutor set me a collection on Aristophanes - that is, a practice exam which was a trial run for the real thing which would take place at the end of the following term. I assumed this was the preliminary to an announcement of arrangments for my Aristophanes tutorials.

I took this practice exam and handed it in. My tutor explained that she had arranged to have it assessed by Letitia Edwards of St Hugh's (a specialist in Aristophanes). So it was sent to Dr Edwards, and I think she gave it some kind of high beta mark, and my tutor returned it to me. And that was it.

I remember walking out of that meeting with my tutor. I remember thinking: - but that's the wrong way of putting it. I can throw in some sentences - "What am I going to do? What in God's name do I do?" but there weren't any sentences. My contemporaries at other colleges - the ones who'd done the Aristophanes special subject - had all had a term of tutorials on Aristophanes, for which they had written an essay a week; they'd had reading lists, they'd done the background reading and grappled with the various issues relating to Aristophanes; and, well, erm, just because you are paying overseas fees for, ahem, "tuition" does not mean that your tutor considers herself under any obligation to set up the tuition for which you've paid. Whereas, truth be told, I think the average tart, paid for a blow job, does actually suck dick. And, truth be told, the disutility to a client of an overpriced subpar blow job strikes me as dramatically lower than that of the disutility to a university student of overpriced subpar tuition.

Payment for the tuition must be drummed up by selling time, one way or another - that is, time that could be spent on independent reading must be sold to pay for the tuition, which means that the tuition is, notionally, of higher value than what the student could achieve by simply reading 40 hours a week. But, um...

After my father retired from the State Department he got a job teaching Geography at the University of Radford, in Radford, Virginia. And my father had a strong preference for setting multiple choice exams, because they could be computer-assessed, he hated essay exams, and he hated setting papers, because they took so much time to mark. My tutor who arranged no tutorials at all was... well, I won't say she was an extreme of slackerdom, because I also had a philosophy tutor who spent the tutorials talking about the jumble sale economy and her feud with the college principal, but anyway I would say that a fondness for collecting a salary and getting away with as little intellectual intercourse as possible is endemic to the academic world. And this is actually pretty nasty.

Racking up £20,000 of student debt (Britain) or $50,000+ (US) is pretty much compulsory for access to a wide range of careers, regardless of the quality of instruction actually provided. An academic who is a good mentor can transform the intellectual abilities of his/her students - I notice that both Julia Annas and Martha Nussbaum acknowledge their debt to G E L Owen, who seems to have been an extraordinary teacher. An academic may also be tired, overworked, alcoholic, lazy; may have settled comfortably into tenure, or may be shuffled around from one short-term teaching post to another, asked to get on top of a succession of subjects at short notice - there are all kinds of reasons why an academic may not teach to a standard justified by the sacrifices required of students and their families.

Collins' comments seemed to me, anyway, to presuppose the thing they wanted to prove - that introducing commerce to a relationship automatically brings with it dishonesty. I can't help feeling that anyone familiar with Hicks's A Market Theory of Money (or, heck, The Wealth of Nations) could not make that assumption. A prostitute is really in a position similar to that of a professional writer: the costs involved are not primarily those of the actual act being paid for, but those of getting custom in the first place. An independent prostitute, at least, will generally be better off if she is in the position of one of my friends, many of whose clients have been coming back for 30 years - which is to say that she plays a game with iterations, so it can't be her dominant strategy to cheat the client on any single transaction. (Academics, of course, have no remotely comparable incentive to chase student loyalty; from a strictly game theoretical point of view, it is much more to their advantage to cheat.)

So, well, it's a bit demoralizing to find the blind spots of the culture replicated by Professor Collins. More could be said, but I've got to see a man about a dog.

* I had better clarify; I don't mean to suggest that the faculty were mediocre; they weren't. The standard of the classes, however, was constrained by the work students could reasonably be expected to do; it was easy to see that many lecturers had been worn down over the years, becoming increasingly "realistic" in their expectations.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also, the average prostitute operates under a threat of violence which is a very strong incentive to do everything possible to convince the john that he has gotten his money's worth. I imagine that beating the shit out of your tutors and taking your money back was not a realistic option.

Andrew Gelman said...

I don't know what economists have written about pre-pay vs. post-pay, but I'd imagine that they'd say that either could be a reasonable equilibrium. Really, though, almost everything is pre-paid, right? The only thing I can think of in my own experience that's postpaid is consulting. And, indeed, I don't always get paid. Often, getting paid requires hassling people to cough it up, and I don't always have the patience for that.

Helen DeWitt said...

I think there are a fair number of people who get paid shortly after providing a service (doctors, dentists, hairdressers, therapists, taxi drivers, plumbers..) Presumably in part because it's not possible to know, beforehand, how much needs to be done.

nsiqueiros said...

The hoops one much jump through in order to get money so as to pay for school only seem to be getting harder. My financial aid office threatened to cancel all future financial aid because they said I was not meeting the satisfactory academic requirements of the university. The reason they said this was because I had two withdrawals on my record this semester. I was extremely sick with flu and bronchitis at the beginning of the semester all the way into March, and I realized too late I was not going to be able to finish all my classes. I withdrew from two, and that still left me as a full-time student anyway. Regardless of the withdrawals, I have a great GPA and even got straight A's this semester (all classes were upper-level and intensive writing, might I add). The financial aid office, however, did not care. They send a nasty letter threatening to cancel all future financial aid if I don't appeal my case immediately. I receive this letter the day before a four day weekend, during which time the financial aid office is not open. The next business day I submit all paperwork necessary, basically a letter from my adviser saying I'm a great student and should not be denied financial aid, as well as a letter from me asking not to be denied financial aid. Now, I think submitting my appeal the very next business day is pretty speedy, but the financial aid office had other ideas and they canceled my financial aid anyway. My appeal is approved, but now I have to start the financial aid process over again. This wouldn't be too bad except I was waiting for loan money, and now I had to go through the loan process and wait period all over again. Suffice it to say, I did not get my loan money till after the summer session had started. Yes, poor head indeed.

Anonymous said...

My mother was a pre-Ada Comstack at Smith in the early 70s, my brother took math classes from 75 to 77 there, and I took math plus other classes from 77 to 79 (my brother and I were HS students at the time). Smith gave a quality education and - what's more - gave all three of us basically a free education. I imagine your desire for suicide had more to do with your erroneous expectations socializing than anything.

Incidentally I went to Oxford for university in 1980 and got socked with the overseas fees as well. I had no problem with my tutors, however, who were all serious and hard-working and went out of their way to help me avoid paying a year's worth of tuition.

Andrew Gelman said...

Yes, good point about doctors, dentists, etc. I just took my bike to the shop yesterday and, indeed, they gave me an estimate but didn't charge me anything up front.

Helen DeWitt said...

Anon 12:50. The faculty at Smith were certainly not intellectually mediocre, but they adapted their level of instruction to what they thought they could expect of the students.

I was at Smith in the late 70s, at a time when many previously men-only Ivy League colleges had just begun accepting women. So Smith became the safe choice for a lot of women who would rather have gone somewhere else.

At the time, Smith had a policy of placing students in residential houses where they would normally remain for the whole four years; meals had to be taken within the house you were assigned. In other words, you couldn't get to know someone interesting in class and go back to their house for lunch or dinner; you were confined to the people you'd been assigned by chance. You could not easily upgrade your experience of Smith by spending time with people you'd chosen to associate with. I was assigned to a house known familiarly as "Jordan Jocks".

The college has since changed its policy on meals, so it has given students with common interests a better chance of getting to know each other.

You and your brother were, I gather, not actually enrolled at Smith. I don't doubt that if I had been living off-campus I would have liked it better. If I had merely gone to a few excellent classes I would no doubt have liked it better. And if I had been permitted to do so for free that would have been better still. It is not much of an endorsement of an institution to say that those who are compelled to live with the rest of the student body and pay for the privilege get a less rewarding experience than non-feepayers who are let off the requirement to live with a randomly selected sample of the student body.

I note that you and your brother studied mathematics. Mathematics is what I would describe as a mainstream subject. I was a classicist. At Smith, at least, classics was treated by those studying it as a quaint subject - the flavour is best conveyed by the whimsical tone of Donna Tartt's Secret History. My guess is that there is no important difference between Smith and Oxford as far as taking mathematics seriously goes; there is a radical difference in the way classical languages and literature were seen.

I can't see that anything in my post suggests that all Oxford dons were shirkers. On the contrary: some were extremely conscientious in execution of their tutorial duties. The point is that the payment of fees did not guarantee that sort of conscientiousness, nor did failure to provide tuition trigger a repayment of fees.

Helen DeWitt said...

Anon 12:50. The faculty at Smith were certainly not intellectually mediocre, but they adapted their level of instruction to what they thought they could expect of the students.

I was at Smith in the late 70s, at a time when many previously men-only Ivy League colleges had just begun accepting women. So Smith became the safe choice for a lot of women who would rather have gone somewhere else.

At the time, Smith had a policy of placing students in residential houses where they would normally remain for the whole four years; meals had to be taken within the house you were assigned. In other words, you couldn't get to know someone interesting in class and go back to their house for lunch or dinner; you were confined to the people you'd been assigned by chance. You could not easily upgrade your experience of Smith by spending time with people you'd chosen to associate with. I was assigned to a house known familiarly as "Jordan Jocks".

The college has since changed its policy on meals, so it has given students with common interests a better chance of getting to know each other.

You and your brother were, I gather, not actually enrolled at Smith. I don't doubt that if I had been living off-campus I would have liked it better. If I had merely gone to a few excellent classes I would no doubt have liked it better. And if I had been permitted to do so for free that would have been better still. It is not much of an endorsement of an institution to say that those who are compelled to live with the rest of the student body and pay for the privilege get a less rewarding experience than non-feepayers who are let off the requirement to live with a randomly selected sample of the student body.

I note that you and your brother studied mathematics. Mathematics is what I would describe as a mainstream subject. I was a classicist. At Smith, at least, classics was treated by those studying it as a quaint subject - the flavour is best conveyed by the whimsical tone of Donna Tartt's Secret History. My guess is that there is no important difference between Smith and Oxford as far as taking mathematics seriously goes; there is a radical difference in the way classical languages and literature were seen.

I can't see that anything in my post suggests that all Oxford dons were shirkers. On the contrary: some were extremely conscientious in execution of their tutorial duties. The point is that the payment of fees did not guarantee that sort of conscientiousness, nor did failure to provide tuition trigger a repayment of fees.

zbicyclist said...

Like Andrew Gelman, I'm familiar with bicycle repair but not prostitution.

In bicycle repair, it is often reasonably clear what the problem is (brakes don't work), what the desired end state is (brakes work), and what sequence of tasks are likely to lie between those. There is some ambiguity as to whether one is being paid for this sequence of tasks (hours of shop labor) or the outcome (brakes work).

There is a lot more ambiguity in many other areas, academics among them, in terms of both the sequence of tasks and the outcome. In universities, this ambiguity is on both the buy side (students), the sell side (university), and the fulfillment side (instructors) -- let along considering the other markets such as the creation of knowledge business and the athletic business.

Mithridates said...

Anon 12:50,

You should be more careful in the future about speculating why a person you don't know might have wanted to commit suicide, especially when that person has given a clear reason for such a desire. It’s startling that in defending a couple of institutions you would make such a cavalier remark. I also don't see what's erroneous about expecting to meet serious, non-mediocre intellectuals at a college. Not that there aren't intellectuals in other places, but there's no other place where we are more justified in our expectations of finding them.

Your response boils down to this: “My experience was different; therefore, you’re wrong about yours.” But your experience is not comparable with Helen’s; you were, after all, in high school, so you were both younger than Helen was and - though I can't be entirely sure of this, given the number of years you spent taking classes at Smith - not as fully involved in the social system of the college as she was. Isn't there a chance that your perception of Smith benefited by comparison with that of your high school?

G.P. Butler said...

Hi Helen,

I really loved this post, especially your description of education in the US and UK. I had similar experiences in Canada and Scotland. In Canada, our lectures were just summaries of the textbook and in Edinburgh, our lectures were basically bull-pit sessions where the students sat around and expressed themselves and the profs interjected occasionally. It really made me realize that there isn't much difference in buying a degree from a degree mill and spending the time as the school. I pretty much educated myself, but the university got to take credit for it.

That said, what I did love about university was the access to first rate libraries, and the collection of really smart and interesting students to hang out with and live with in, in my case, gorgeous historically significant buildings. I just don't know if this is worth $25,000 a year in tuition and fees.

To my mind, universities are facilitators of thinking time. I sort of wonder if the job could be done more cheaply. I.e. what if there were libraries that you could subscribe to and they would collect top notch books and provide IT support for you and comfortable surroundings to study in. Also, they would maintain a database that would match tutors with students when, say, you needed help with a tricky subject that you just couldn't decipher from the literature. The system would be similar to having a music tutor when you want to learn the violin.

The libraries would bring in lecturers on key subjects and arrange discussions after and you could develop your community of fellow intellectual travellers among the people that you kept seeing at the same lectures and social gatherings.

I know this will never work because the universities have somehow cornered the market on declaring people educated in return for payment of a large set of installment fees, but one can dream.

The Steve said...

Though I'm no fan of the dehumanizing (to me, but more on anti-humanism another time) nature of rational actor economic theory, the issue of incentives in academia seems pertinent to this discussion--sorry haven't read all the comments through but this is in response to the general tenor.

I'm a Ph.D. student studying English literature in the US, and I can say with some authority that few incentives exist to provide undergraduates with a quality education--on the professor side, that is. It behooves undergrads to provide themselves with their own quality education, at least as supplementary to whatever else of quality they happen certainly by chance to discover and that assuming they aren't working part time to pay the ever more scandalous fees that entitles them association with the college-educated coterie, whatever that's worth outside the Ivies and their ilk.

Even in the humanities, the work of grad students and professors tends to be research-oriented. Excellent teachers exist, of course, especially at teaching-oriented colleges, but the vast majority of educators are poorly paid--whether as grad students, adjuncts, part-time lecturers, or assistant professors--and do not receive any merit-based rewards for anything other than publication. There are exceptions, but the professionalization of the humanities and what is now being called the "preprofessionalization" of graduate students has ensured that a steady supply of overworked and overstressed grad students are marching steadily through increasingly competitive, decreasingly funded Ph.D. programs on their way to an increasingly competitive and demanding job market for which there are a decreasing number of tenure-track positions.

If I have to spend all my time working on my dissertation and/or preparing articles for publication; if my teaching load (and that of professors) is assumed more as a burden to be endured than part of our job description--and thereby entailing the least possible investiture of time; and if my pay package renders me so impoverished and powerless in a system in which my employment is so precarious, why should I or any other grad student or beleaguered adjunct/PTL give two FF's about undergraduate education?

Well, few of us are so calculating and cynical, but it seems indicative of society's true priorities that education is starved out while other sectors receive largesse whether they produce real economic benefits for society or drag everyone down to hell. More and more university teaching positions are being occupied by grad students, PTLs, and adjuncts, so this problem is only likely to get worse. Apathy ought not to be built into the system with the expectation that professional ethics or the pipe-dream of a future career will encourage us to put up with anything. My university, for example (and it's not unique), has recently cut T.A. funding for all graduate students beyond their 7th year and all beyond their 6th who aren't teaching in the writing program. More of us will have to take on higher teaching loads (with no benefits) to make up the difference, since few students finish humanities Ph.D.s in that time frame. I can't count anymore how many of my colleagues have given up and gone to law school (or to work in finance).

Your situation at Oxford may have been different, because it was a different time in a different country, and I understand that Oxbridge is noted for its lackadaisical ways. As for Smith, there is, of course, longstanding criticism of the tenure system but probably little that can or should be done about it. The university system of education itself could probably do with an overhaul, since its primary teaching methods (lectures) are ineffective and they still serve more as mechanisms of social reproduction (pace Bourdieu) than, with notable exceptions, places where students actually learn anything.

Glad I got that off my chest! I suppose I should stop killing time and get back to King Lear now.

The Steve said...

I just noticed G. P. Butler's wondering whether a university social experience in lieu of a proper education "is worth $25,000 a year in tuition and fees." So I should add--

I completely understand this common and sensible sort of calculation. I wonder myself. Ultimately, people seem willing, if they are able (and some even if they are not), to pay whatever the universities charge, and the degree-granting business would therefore seem, at least for now, to be a seller's market. Given the social and economic benefits that redound to those who go to college (especially to elite institutions), however, I would have to say it probably is worth $25,000/year and possibly many times more than that.

More whimsically, wouldn't you also have a hard time putting a price tag on access, in this world, and given the array of what otherwise you might spend your money on, to "really smart and interesting students to hang out with and live with"?

Anonymous said...

There is an interesting saying about the American collegiate education, which is that your education is what you make of it. Meaning, of course, that you can no longer expect to be given an education; rather, you have to get your education yourself. College students have to be self-motivated if they want to really learn something. I took an upper level English grammar and usage class this last semester, and my professor didn't even go over punctuation.

You're paying these people good money to educate you. The least they could do is make a decent effort.

-Nate-

The Steve said...

Actually, you're paying the institution, not the professors, who are only a small and sometimes irrelevant part of often enormous mini-societies comprising dormitories, dining facilities, student life offices, expensive athletics programs, recreation centers, seasonal events, computer labs, security forces, libraries, and sometimes even transportation and other infrastructure. If you can determine what (small) portion of the total allotment goes to professors (not counting state subsidies), we can figure out the average hourly wage and the quality of service you might reasonably expect therefrom.

G.P. Butler said...

As The Steve said, it would be hard to pay for access to the type of people you get to hang out with at university. Plus, there is no reason to expect that they would want to hng out with you even if you paid the price.

Its interesting to note, that people now even pay to have internships in companies, or to go on archeological digs.

I am struck by the scene in Good Will Hunting, where Will points out that he got a better education from his Boston library card than the student he was confronting did with all his tuition fees to Harvard.

What is it about place like Harvard that so capture our (and our employers) imagination?

Helen DeWitt said...

At Oxford you can pay £300 a term (about $600) and go to as many university lectures as you like; the lecture lists are available from the University Offices, and also in most college Porter's Lodges. So you can have access to an enormous range of lectures by people who are extremely eminent in their field, the same lectures that are attended by university undergraduates and graduates. So in fact there is no difficulty whatsoever in hanging out with the undergraduates or graduates if you want to do so. What you do not get is tutorials: you will not be part of the system of writing weekly essays and discussing them with a tutor. (I'm not sure whether this includes the right to go to mathematics classes, say, and have work corrected; in some cases, at least, it certainly includes the right to have some work corrected, since I knew an Australian who attended classes in Linear B on these terms and handed in work along with the rest of the class.) Since you are not matriculated, you are also not entitled to sit university examinations and take a degree.

The Steve said...

That sounds like quite an amazing deal at Oxford, though not being officially part of the system probably means your presence won't carry much weight in terms of elite access, if that's what one is after (does paying 300 pounds also grant access to the common rooms?). By way of comparison, I know you can audit courses at Princeton as a member of the general public for $125 *per course* which is still quite cheap, I guess, though not all courses are available, and I believe auditors are expected to remain silent during class meetings.

Helen DeWitt said...

Well, I wasn't actually interested in elite access, I just wanted to study classics at a university where the subject was taken seriously.

With regard to the right to access to the common rooms, no, the £300 does not include that. But the thing is, an Oxford undergraduate only has the right to use the Junior Common Room in his or her own college - if I'm at LMH, that doesn't give me the right to hang out in the JCR at Corpus or Christ Church or Balliol. If you have a friend at another college, you might go back to the JCR with them... except that, in many colleges, nobody spends any time in the JCR anyway. Or rather... look, I will simply pass on the way this is perceived, or rather was perceived when I was there (it may be different now). It used to be the case, at least, that only a handful of pathetic people who had nothing better to do hung out in the JCR - the fact that they spent time in the JCR told you everything you needed to know. So access to a JCR would only give you access to the type of person who hangs out in the JCR. Elite access this is not.

Graduate common rooms are (were) different, because you have graduate students morosely putting off the time when they must go to the Bodleian and work on their thesis. So highpowered intellectuals were to be found there, playing bridge, watching cricket, watching EastEnders, watching Neighbours and Dallas (back in the day)... If you've made friends with a graduate student in a seminar, though, it's not especially tricky to weasel your way into the Holy of Holies, the Middle Common Room - the graduate student will be only too happy to take you back, so you too can play bridge, watch TV, read the papers... (I can't say that I ever had much interest in watching TV, but it loomed large among interests of most frequenters of the Common Room.) I did meet more interesting people as a graduate student than I did as an undergraduate, but luckily I don't have to put a price tag on this because I was on a Senior Scholarship.

Andrew Gelman said...

I don't know how relevant this is . . . but when I visited Oxford a couple years ago (to speak at a workshop at Nuffield College on social network modeling), I was surprised by how non-bustling it was, as an academic environment. My impression was that, compared to an American Ivy League university, it's probably a great place for undergrads and maybe for postdocs, but not so great for faculty and grad students. It was a bit of a letdown after all the "Oxford" hype. By comparison, I think that Harvard, Columbia, etc., by and large do live up to the hype.

G.P. Butler said...

Regarding US elite schools versus Oxbridge. I have to say that when I was trying to decide between U Chicago and Edinburgh, Chicago did have some pretty strong advantages. I was invited to spend a day taking courses at the Committee on Social Thought and it was like nothing I experienced at Edinburgh or Oxford.

I sat in on a class on Plato's Laws and it was packed. People were literally sitting in the doorway and I think a couple of chairs were set up in the hall.

It really was an intoxicating experience and it seemed like the most naturally thing to give over the price of a very nice sport car to have a year in such an environment. An yet, living in Ottawa with a million other people, you would think that if I put an ad up on Craiglist or a few choice bulletin boards, i could probably find 5 or 10 people who would hang out with me and learn Greek and read Plato together. I imagine that in the same way, the John's picking up prostitutes could probably get a girlfriend if they wanted to, but its so much work.