Archive for the ‘ Planning Education ’ Category
The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker 2011
And so to question:
McCleans ranking of Canadian universities and colleges
Rankings of Sustainability for North American universities
Rankings of planning programs by
Assessing performance of university departments
Assessing faculty for merit, tenure and promotion
Use of indicators such as GDP, Genuine Progress, Wellbeing etc
Yoram Bauman, Environmental Economist, University of Washington
For a good laugh and an outstanding example of inspired lecturing technique listen to his Ten Principles of Economics
Same questions for planning. Different answers? Yes, and no. Stay tuned for more on this. (And note, in the face of its crisis, how Legal Education is Reforming) NYT article created a flood of responses on various blogs and a debate about the merits of the Socratic and questioning methods of teaching Three months later a damning book Failing Law Schools, see Stanley Fish’s review The Bad News Law Schools
The broader context of assessment of university education is also relevant:
Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? by Anthony Grafton in New York Review of Books (2011)
Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities by Anthony Grafton in New York Review of Books (2010)
In the mean time, here is one view on The State of City Planning Today by Allan Jacobs.
Do I agree with him? No, and yes. More on why later.
And for a useful look at the wider context for teaching planning into which I would like to put my responses, see Planning the Paths of Planning Schools by Bruce Stiftel (2009)
Stiftel’s arguments sent my thoughts back to when I applied to be Director of SCARP in 1998 and the three priorities I identified in my letter of application as those that I would pursue if appointed:
Interestingly writing 10 years later, Bruce Stiftel concludes by making a very similar set of recommendations for planning schools facing governance challenges around the world. During the 7 years that I was Director of SCARP (1999-2006) I succeeded in achieving my three priorities to a certain extent but not as much as I would have liked. Now that I am retiring I will have the time to reflect on this experience and assess more carefully what was achieved and what was not. I am particularly interested in exploring the reasons for success and failure and how to do better in future. Stay tuned.
At the end of his 2011 article “Planning Theory Education: A Thirty-Year Review” it is worth noting that Richard Klosterman concludes:
The critical importance of building “character”, what it is and how to build it
David Brooks on new book Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith et al.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer
“…..all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz19oxDiThk