Fish-y Logic on Higher Ed

In his Times column($) today, Stanley Fish begins by making a perfectly reasonable observation:

Whenever I’m asked, and sometimes even before I’m asked, I advise parents of college-age children to not send their sons and daughters to private schools, but to send them to public institutions, at least if there are any good ones in their state. I say this for the obvious reason. The tuition/fee difference between a good private school and a good state school can be as much as $40,000, and, aside from the dubious coin of prestige, it’s hard to see what you would be buying.

before going on to discuss the state of higher education in Florida, saying some things that aren't true, and then contradicting himself:

Florida is not even in the second tier of university systems in this country. Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, nevermind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina...Five straight years of steadily increased funding, tuition raises and high-profile faculty hires would send a message that something really serious is happening. Ten more years of the same, and it might actually happen.

Virginia doesn't really have a university "system" per se; it has the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech and a bunch of other loosely governed individual campuses. The University of Florida is in the bottom half of the "First Tier" of national university according to U.S. News, just like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Georgia Tech (UVA just makes the top half with a tie for #24).

And if public universities really do offer a similar quality of education at a fraction of the cost of privates, why does Fish want them to become...more like privates? Hike tuition, raise more money, and then spend it on a bunch of faculty who made their reputations as scholars and researchers, not teachers? That's exactly the kind of status-obsessed, students-be-damned behavior that public universities should be avoiding.

Update: Sherman Dorn, who works at a public university in Florida, comments here.