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This is a results driven world and too many of you are buying into the branding hype of these universities. It's not the association with MIT or Harvard that spawns Nobel Laureates but the quality of the papers written by these Laureats. Hell, even a Swiss patent clerk has one. The common denominator isn't the school but their higher than average intelligence and work ethic.
It is a results driven world and I am thankful for that because I wasn't born the descendant of Conrad Hilton or Robert Kardashian.
But the fact is the people who have the work ethic, the will power, the higher than average intelligence
tend to attend and graduate from certain schools. We want A&M to be a place that attracts those kinds of people.
Now, you might say it doesn't matter if they congregate at Harvard or not, and I'd say that's at least partially true- but when a bunch of hard working smart folks gather, I do think there are great benefits.
They push each other to be their best. They bounce ideas and theories off of each other. They have stimulating conversation. It creates an environment that I think makes everyone a better student of whatever discipline they are in.
I think that also leads to other benefits- better professors (they seek out stimulating environments), better libraries (there are actually significant amounts of people putting them to use), etc...
On a similar note- one thing I am really afraid of is that our class sizes will have to grow- perhaps significantly. I think that is terrible for the academic experience. It gives students less face time with their professors, it leads to students standing around in their labs watching another student use the equipment. And I think students don't get to know each other as well as they would in smaller classes.
And I'm certainly terrified of having to increase the number of online classes.
I also don't want students to have to wait to get on a computer in a computer lab. I don't want them to struggle to get put on the schedule to see a counselor.
I generally don't want A&M to turn into a place where everyone is constantly battling crowds in order to see who they are trying to see and do what they are trying to do. That was my experience when I took a summer class at the Dallas County Community College, and it was terrible.
If you can point to anything reliable which suggests our human and other physical infrastructure is keeping up with the student population both in quantity
and quality, then please show me. It'll make me feel a little better, but I've been struggling to find that kind of information.
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Not everyone is going to be designing space based neutron beam weapons. Some of us will have to run the chemical processing plants in Baytown or operate the reactors at South Texas (Nuclear) Project. Someone needs to be the sales rep for agriculture recycling companies. Drillers need land men and submersible project managers. Communities need police officers and teachers and the Marines need platoons leaders. I know many of these people and they are called Aggies.
We have school pride because we share a brotherly bond that stretches across generations. Our traditions give us common experiences that knit us together in a way others can't comprehend. When I look upon the memorial at the front of the quad and try to hold back tears reading the names of my classmates, I know the Aggie 30 years my senior standing just a few feet to my right is also thinking about the times he spent with his old classmates, just as he has done a hundred times before.
If you can't take pride in a school like that, there are other places for you.
And you think growing the student population by the thousands every year is conducive to creating closely-knit graduating classes with a strong sense of community and brotherhood?
