[Clips] Rodney Dangerfield University

Several well-known cypherpunks have been George Mason Alums. Most joined while they were in school there. Cheers, RAH -------- --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips@philodox.com Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:21:10 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List From: "R. A. Hettinga" Subject: [Clips] Rodney Dangerfield University Reply-To: rah@philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces@philodox.com http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008168 OpinionJournal WSJ Online DE GUSTIBUS Rodney Dangerfield University It's time that George Mason got a little respect. BY BRENDAN MINITER Friday, March 31, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST "You've got to be kidding." That was the reaction of CBS sportscaster Billy Packer when George Mason University was invited to play in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament. Mason has since defeated Michigan State, the University of North Carolina, Wichita State and the top-seeded University of Connecticut to advance to the Final Four this weekend. The Patriots basketball team is finding out what the rest of the university has long known. George Mason is the Rodney Dangerfield of universities--it just can't get any respect. The school has attracted Nobel economists, developed a top-notch law school and, through the writings of its scholars, affected public policy in major ways. But it is continually dismissed as a no-name state school--a mere convenience for commuters from northern Virginia. Allow me to take offense. When I enrolled at Mason in 1993, a condescending friend described the school to me as a "glorified community college with pretensions of being an elite university." At that point, young and naive, I worried he might be right. By the time I graduated I knew better. With some 28,000 students, GMU resembles many large state schools in that it provides an affordable education to a broad range of people. For state residents, tuition is about $3,000 a semester; for those out of state, $8,500. (These amounts roughly correspond to a few weeks of classroom time at nearby Georgetown.) The education it offers is intellectually rigorous--I can attest to the rigor, having suffered through plenty of annoyingly demanding tests, paper-writing assignments and required courses. But George Mason has no intentions of being an "elite" institution, and a good thing too. Mason began as an extension of the University of Virginia in 1957 and became independent 15 years later. Such relative youth is a clear advantage. The school came into its own after the 1960s generation passed through the halls of higher education. Student protest, and the effort to appease it, never became part of its culture. George W. Johnson, GMU's president from 1978 to 1996, exploited this advantage. He grounded the school in technology, computer science and economics, leaving to elite institutions the competition for hot (read: postmodern) humanities scholars. He also exploited the school's proximity to Washington, using it as a selling point to bring professors to the area and also pulling into the professorial ranks various policy analysts, intellectuals and former government officials. The recruited professors included James Buchanan, who joined the university in 1983 and soon after won a Nobel Prize in economics for his groundbreaking research, with Gordon Tullock, on what drives government bureaucracies to make seemingly irrational decisions. The economists showed that government, no less than private enterprise, responds to economic incentives (e.g., bigger budgets) more than high-minded legislative goals. This idea--known as "Public Choice Theory"--became part of the intellectual framework of the Reagan Revolution. Mr. Johnson also brought to George Mason the Institute for Humane Studies, a constellation of scholars devoted to teaching undergrads (both at GMU and elsewhere) classical economics. Soon after Mr. Johnson stepped down, the economist Vernon Smith and six colleagues migrated to Mason from the University of Arizona. Mr. Smith won a Nobel Prize for developing standards to "lab test" economic theories with small groups, often using real money. Mason's law school isn't even three decades old, but it has already climbed into the first tier of the U.S. News & World Report rankings and is a leader in the field of intellectual property. It is also home to the National Center for Technology and Law, which studies how existing laws--e.g., patents and copyrights--will need to adapt to the information economy. Even the law school's legal-aid program has a novel slant. As John Miller has noted in National Review, George Mason's law students, rather than suing police departments or petitioning for access to government programs, volunteer their time to help, among others, members of the military and their families. Even the school's name cuts against the grain of conventional pieties. George Mason is the Founding Father most Americans have never heard of. He was a key architect of the Constitution (he had written the influential Virginia Bill of Rights more than a decade before) but doomed himself to obscurity by becoming one of the three delegates to the Constitutional Convention who refused to sign the final document. It bothered him that it lacked a bill of rights. Whether or not George Mason University wins on the basketball court this weekend, it is still a great school. And no, Mr. Packer, I'm not kidding. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips@philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'