Healthy Spaces

Schools of public health should boycott US News and World Report (USNWR) and other rankings that do not consider a school’s impact on its own community’s health.   The dirty open secret about the USNWR ranking is a pathetic lack of validity.   Each year the magazine sends a one question survey to public health deans and program directors asking them to rank each other from 1 to 5. Being best school only depends on getting top votes from the fellow members of the deans and directors club.   Big schools naturally have more alumni to vote that their alma mater was best.   Small schools and programs of exceptional impact and merit cannot possibly win this beauty contest.   It would be a career-killing travesty if a professor announced, “Instead of a final exam to assign your grade, we will just have all the students vote on who they think is the best student.”   No dean would accept such foolishness, so why condone it for themselves. Not only do they p...

  Virtuous Schools of Public Health In public health, we long for virtue. We want to be the best, be with the best, do our best.   We score and measure virtue.   Striving for excellence gives meaning to what we do. These days companies like US News and World Report have found a way to monetize the production of virtue metrics for higher education.   Let’s reflect on virtue, especially virtue in a school of public health (SPH).   What would define a virtuous school of public health?     Greek philosophers used the word arete “ full realization of potential purpose” liberally to assign virtue to humans and non-humans.   A jug, a horse, a house, a chariot, and a warrior could all have “ arete” .   Plato’s allegory of the cave, compared the archetypal ideal form of things to the realizations of everyday life.   For example, the jug on my table might have a crack making it less virtuous than the theoretically ideal jug.   ...