The University of Alaska brags about being a “world-class” university, yet its dereliction and ineptness tell a different story. If you have to tell people that you’re a world-class university, then you’re not. If you have to tell people that students and academics come first, then they don’t.
World-class universities are bland on the outside, hotbeds of education and ideas on the inside. They spend their money on education, not sports, bloated administrations, bloated facilities.
The mature want quality and hard work. The immature want welfare and entertainment. Which is the university attracting? People value only what they work for, struggle for, sacrifice for. The more people are given, the more they want and the less grateful they are for it.
From Nietzsche, education is the offering of food only to those who hunger for it. Higher education and large enrollments are a contradiction in terms. One must earn the right to be part of so high a privilege: the higher, the fewer.
Those who can’t teach, administrate. Any administrator who will not work in the trenches, teaching side by side with faculty, should be fired. They have no place in education.
— Thomas Harrison Morse
UAA faculty
Anchorage
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