W&M Pros and Cons?

Farquhar
Thu, 27 Apr 2017 13:16:27 +0000

@IzzoOne

Niche isn’t the only place that indicates that W&M professors are among the best teachers in the US. For a very long time US News and World Report (either that or Princeton Review) ranked W&M the 4th best school in the country for undergraduate teaching (W&M has just recently slid about 10 spots in this category). Teaching supposedly on par with Princeton and Brown is a widely touted point about W&M, which is why I brought it up. When I went to W&M, the college president often opined during speeches that W&M had the best professors dedicated to teaching in the US. I don’t remember that anyone ever called his bluff. It has always been a deep and inscrutable mystery to me how anyone could come to the logical, thought-out conclusion that W&M has somehow managed to magically select for teachers that are so good at teaching, especially as W&M has a relatively small endowment and budget. I have no clue when this talking point evolved (that’s all it is), but I suspect W&M created it because it was one of the only ways it could argue it is competitive with elite schools.

I don’t recall what the US News methodology was, but I remember it was not very scientific. I suspect that the absurd Niche score is based on student bias – if a school constantly, over decades, touts itself as having a specific superlative quality, then students will be more likely to think it true and parrot it. Students are even more likely to have that engrained belief if they only attended W&M or attended W&M and a very bad college.

I understand that the art of persuasion and repetition is so strong that if you hand someone a chocolate flavored ice-cream and tell them that it is strawberry enough and with utter conviction, then they will actually experience it as strawberry ice-cream. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who believe that their country is the greatest, their school is the best, their faith the truest, etc. And they generally believe it for one reason – it has been beaten into them. W&M beats its talking points into students like no other college I know of, aside from the big Christian colleges like Liberty.

But my experience is just one person’s. I know most of my friends at W&M seemed to agree, but who knows what they really think. I took more classes at W&M than at any other school, and had maybe 1 professor who really seemed to give a rat’s a**. And he was also my advisor – and he also wasn’t a top scholar in his field (sorry, I still love you man). In graduate school, I had 11 out of 13 professors who were exceptional (and one who was W&M style… I dropped her class). All of the teachers I had in the various classes I took for professional development at other schools were better than W&M.

It’s good for W&M if people believe it has exceptional teachers – I’m sure people have opted for W&M over UVa or even better schools over this talking point – but it would be a disservice to any potential W&M student reading this thread to let that BS claim stand unchallenged.