Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution blog fame and colleague Peter Boettke author this Slate.com piece that places the unlikely NCAA Basketball Tournament Final Four appearance by George Mason University in the context of an overall renaissance that is occurring at the university as it copes with competition in the marketplace of ideas:

What’s remarkable is that GMU’s freewheeling basketball team and its free-market academic teams owe their successes to very similar, market-beating strategies. GMU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different. . . .
GMU remains an underdog in both basketball and economics. But Coach Larranaga has a plan to succeed in the long term and so do GMU’s professors. Click here to read about how GMU is seeking out different new kinds of undiscovered geniuses.

Are you listening, University of Houston?