Top Tier Insider

Top Tier Insider presents a spin-free view of America’s leading universities. For now, we’re concentrating on the traditional Ancient Eight of the Ivy League, Brown, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale, along with Chicago and Stanford. Arguably other great research universities like Duke and Washington might be included in this ranking, and perhaps in the future, they will be. Cal Tech and MIT aren’t covered except as circumstances warrant; these outstanding schools reflect more focused academic programs than the others noted above.

My motivation in creating this web site is to provide some deeper insights into the many issues facing these world-class schools in the 21st century. The target audience includes current and potential students and their families (the latter being the ones who most often write the checks that make it possible for students to attend colleges and universities), as well as alumni, faculty, friends, and administrators, none of whom has the time anymore to keep up with what’s going on in their own institutions, much less nine others. I use a variety of sources to identify important stories that affect the Top Tier schools and then try to cull these down into a manageable set of references for the consideration of readers. In general, I won’t try to rewrite the source articles (there’s just not enough time in the world for one person to do that), but occasionally I will take the privilege of commenting in more detail in a subject area where I feel the interested reader would benefit from background material.

For those who are curious, my name is John Wiesenfeld, and I was a faculty member at Cornell University for almost 25 years. In addition, I served as the chemistry department chair, deputy vice president for research, and vice president for academic programs and planning. In addition, I was (in my younger years) a research fellow at Cambridge University, and a visiting faculty member at Stanford. After leaving CU, I spent a decade teaching and being a senior administrator at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, so I have extensive experience in both state-assisted and private universities. I’m the Insider, and I very much hope that you find this web site to be occasionally amusing and, in any case, of some practical interest.