How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 203 The students objected that there were no faculty around and were no classes, so they felt cheated in some way and asked why they had to show up at all. We replied that they didn’t, since all the materials they needed were online anyway. The students were assigned mentors who were on campus, but after a while students interacted with them by instant message instead of walking down the hall even when the students were on campus. The students started out hating what we did and wound up loving it. These were students in master’s degree programs and they were, in essence, simulating the jobs they were preparing for, Even the faculty in Pittsburgh came to appreciate what we were doing in California. But you will never hear about it (except from me). Carnegie Mellon will never brag about it or publicize it in any way. Why not? What I did is very threatening. At one point the provost, realizing that since the program was online, in principle we could serve a lot of students, asked me whether I was going to put Golden Arches over the campus and say over a million served. Seemed a good idea to me. But not to Carnegie Mellon. We don’t want to cheapen our brand name, the provost told me. In other words, if hundreds of thousands of people had Carnegie Mellon degrees, how prestigious would such a degree be? These de- grees were in computer science, a field in which Carnegie Mellon is number one or two in the world. But if too many people had these degrees, the university’s prestige would go down, so whether or not this was good educational practice, and the certifying boards certainly thought it was, this was never going to happen. I made the mistake of saying in an interview how well our experi- ment was going, and was told by Carnegie Mellon to stop doing that. It seemed that parents of undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon were calling and asking why, if this method was so preferable to the usual course-based metho