Longest-Serving Professor at Cornell Reflects on Journey Through Academia

Interesting quote here:<p>&gt; The university, although still of substantial size back then [50-60 years ago], operated in a bottom-up manner, Nerode told The Sun. &quot;All the faculty in all departments met in the auditorium to decide the future of the university. It is now top-down, but that is also the case everywhere else,&quot; Nerode said.<p>I wonder, is this bottom-up (professor-led) vs top-down (administrator-led) shift a real thing felt by many old-time academics? It seems like this may be happening in a lot of different industries (e.g. medicine) and leading to &quot;cost disease&quot;[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;09&#x2F;considerations-on-cost-disease&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;09&#x2F;considerations-on-cost...</a>

<i>&quot;I learned how to acquire new subjects because I had to walk into class and pick up everything that the people had done before,&quot; Nerode told The Sun. ... Nerode remarked that &quot;there was no such thing as an academic advisor for people going to college.&quot;</i><p>This is important. A fellow like Nerode could walk into any university and be fine, and his background is a major reason. Nowadays, universities are open to much wider swathes of the population, and these people need support services, or they&#x27;d fail out. Everyone who complains about the growth of the administrative hydrocephalus must consider this fact.

He had some great observations as a young man. I studied physics decades later but the attitude was still the same.<p><i>The professor got up for the first session and said look to your right, look to your left, one of you won’t be here next semester,” he said. “I found that to be the attitude of physicists towards students: to cut down the number of students as much as possible and deal only with the ones that they wanted to. I just did not find that a very humanistic thing.”</i>

My academic grandfather.