Dr. Jeremy Wells

Research has clearly established there there is no direct relationship between a person’s ability to research/publish and be an effective teacher. This is useful to keep in mind when looking at university rankings which prioritize professors’ publication and citation records. Effective teaching is notoriously hard to quantify and university rankings do not capture this dimension accurately.

The relationship between a university's ranking and employment success is highest for individuals who seek employment as a tenure-track professor (or equivalent in countries without the tenure system) in a post-secondary educational institution. In the US, the vast majority of such professors have graduated from a handful of universities with a high ranking, such as Ivy Leagues (eg, Harvard, Columbia), or research intensive public universities (eg, University of Chicago, University of California). Otherwise, the effect is far more negligible.

The contextless nature of this advice post is most odd. Nearly all aspects of the overlap of transportation planning and the protection of historic/heritage built, landscape, and archeological assets are pre-determined by statutory obligations by whatever governmental entity is involved. No one undertakes this kind of work independently of the specific regulation that must guide the process; similarly, although some of us might like to think otherwise, almost no one takes additional steps that are not statutorily required because the added time, resources, and expenses such an endeavor incurs. No one’s going to pay for it. In sum, there’s no useful value in this post except as a strange way to explore public policy theory.

It is important that in upholding academic freedom, individuals and institutions are careful in separating incivility from academic freedom. Institutions of higher education are prone to excuse bullying and harassment under the guise of “academic freedom” rather than holding these individuals accountable. The abuse of academic freedom, in this way, is a human rights issue. See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12142-024-00713-y

Public participation needs to happen from the start of the planning process, not only just toward the end as these steps indicate.

Action research is one of the best ways to involve the public in collecting and analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data to guide the planning process. The selection of other methods needs to be done with a clear recognition that the desire for conventional experts to control the process and insert their values is somehow important or essential. If there is a sincere desire to involve the public in meaningful ways, efforts should be made to instead use some form of action research in gathering, analyzing, and acting on these data. Otherwise, language that refers to community “participation” can often be perceived as tokenism.