University Buzz: “Everyone wants to be associated with Columbia…”
…is *my* favourite quote in this article, about my own Alma mater:
New York Magazine: “The Freakonomics of Columbia University’s Economics Department”
It’s about how Columbia’s president conceived of a “dream team” in Economics and managed to recruit it, by convincing top scholars in Economics that other top scholars would come to Columbia, too.
“Davis couldn’t break the cycle by hiring one top economist a year for fifteen years, because no one was going to leave Harvard or Princeton for a second-rate department. But sunspot theory held a tantalizing alternative: He just might be able to break the cycle by trying to hire ten or fifteen star economists in a year or two—a game-changing move designed to alter people’s perceptions. If everyone expected everyone else to accept the offer, then the department they’d be joining wouldn’t be second-rate.”
This tells you something about American universities. That “second-rate” department had at least three Nobel prizes in Economics (William Vickrey 1996, Robert Mundell 1999, Joseph Stieglitz 2001) + surely several other Nobel winners have a pedigree including Columbia… And, which European university would have $10 million dollar as recruitment money for just one department?!
/Gunilla
(only a *B* student in International Economics, as taught at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs 2000–2002…)
