LAST YEAR was my first year back in academia after a two-year hiatus and I had quite forgotten the importance of rankings to the collective institutional ego. I was more than a little amused by how frequently this newspaper would give above-the-fold billing to seemingly obscure rankings. My classmates can attest to the many times I would come into class clutching the day's paper and chortling about the fact that, apparently, the most important news of the day was the University basketball team's relative graduation rate or something equally trivial.
The truth is that if you compare us to other schools we're good, we're bad, we're beautiful, and we're ugly, depending on how you look at it. But the attention garnered by specialized rankings in which the University does well puts our obsession with navel-gazing into an amusing light. Universities in general -- and the University in particular -- would be better off if they recognized that institutional status-seeking is a tedious goal.
Here are some of the rankings articles that made it onto the front page first semester last year (in chronological order). Starting the year off, the University ranked 35th on Black Enterprise's list of top 50 colleges for African-Americans. On September 14th we discovered the Law School had the third highest number of clerks at the Supreme Court. On September 21st we found out that Kiplinger ranked the University third best value among American public colleges.
At the risk of boring the reader, let's go through October's editions. On October 4 we learned from the front page that we were the 11th "fittest" school as ranked by Men's Fitness magazine (not as exciting though, admittedly, as the University's 2005 mention as "hottest for fitness" by Kaplan/Newsweek). The October 26 edition of The Cavalier Daily informed us that 51 of the nation's top five thousand doctors (as ranked by "America's Top Doctors") were affiliated with the University.
All that in one half of one semester. We must be pretty hot stuff here at the University. Certainly that was the feeling of The Cavalier Daily's managing board last year when, in a lead editorial, they compared the troika of Harvard, Yale, and the University ("the Big Three of elite American universities") to the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference.
Always the contrarian, I fired up my Web browser and did a little devil's advocate-style research to discover if we held up so well in rankings that weren't publicized in this paper. First, I delved into the Princeton Review's rankings of the best 366 colleges, which ranks colleges on academic, extracurricular, social, and other metrics derived from surveys taken by approximately 100,000 students each year. Only the top 20 schools in each category were reported, and the University places in the top 20 in only three of them -- job placement services, college library and jock school (its ranks were fifteenth, sixteenth and fifteenth, respectively).
The University of Maryland places in the top 20 on more lists than we do -- diverse student population, best college newspaper, students pack the stadium and party schools. Then again, Berkeley didn't make it onto any of the lists, so I guess there's not too much to worry about on this front.
I also discovered in my research that, according to a ranking created by the makers of Trojan condoms, we have less safe sex than many colleges including Harvard, Princeton and Yale (confound them). One last example: the University placed a predictably mediocre 714th in parking quality according to the (methodologically shady) survey on CollegeDirt.com.
I certainly hope no one takes any of this as an indictment of the University. But if there is no point in portraying the University to be worse than it is by cherry-picking rankings, there is as little point in trying to make it look better than it is. Rather, we could pursue independently determined values -- the pursuit of truth, understanding and -- dare I say -- wisdom, beyond the jockeying for prestige with institutions around the country.
Sadly, such sentiments were probably only possible, if ever, for universities accorded preeminence and insulated from market pressures to the extent that, say, Harvard or Yale was when they served as finishing schools for the New England aristocracy a century ago. So watch out Berkeley, we're gunning for you.
Andrew Winerman is a Cavalier Daily Viewpoint Writer. He is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Economics.
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