How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 199 of a fraudulent institution. He reacted the way you might expect and demanded an explanation. I asked him if he thought the average stu- dent attending the University of Illinois was going there because she figured after graduation she would be able to get a job. He agreed. I then asked whether job skills were in fact taught to the majority of students there and whether the faculty, by and large, actually had ever worked anyplace but a university. He laughed. It is OK that Yale hires only intellectuals and only the best of the best because Yale is not a state-run institution and Yale can do what it wants. No one is making anyone go to Yale. Caveat emptor. But a state spending a great deal of money on its flagship educa- tional institution ought to know what it is getting. This is what it is getting—yYale. There are no faculty members at the University of Illinois in any mainstream department (I don’t mean agriculture, for example) who do not consider themselves the equal of, and in some cases better than, their Yale colleagues. When I went to Northwestern, I was given the right to hire a va- riety of faculty in a number of disciplines that related to learning. When you recruit faculty, you mostly consider how your institution might look better to someone at another institution. So, Northwestern doesn’t recruit from Harvard or MIT (or Yale!) very often because Chi- cago doesn’t seem a more appealing place than Boston to an academic and Northwestern isn’t a step up. And, Northwestern doesn’t recruit from California in general, for the same reason. So, it’s the University of [linois! I recruited heavily from [linois because Chicago looks more ap- pealing than Champaign-Urbana to most people, so I had something to offer, and the faculty there had already bought into the idea of liv- ing in the Midwest. Moreover, in the academic world, the University of Illinois is considered to a top-ranked instituti