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Rise Up Against the Rankings!

By Zach Marks - Aug 17th, 2007 at 5:06 pm EDT

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Tags: college rankings, Columbia, Higher Education, Huffington Post, IvyGate, Jim D, U.S. News and World Report, Yale

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Jim D commented earlier that today was the day we’ve all been waiting: the day the U.S. News and World Report rankings come out. Well I’m tired of this shit. Not because I’m tired of Yale always being No. 3. Not because I’m tired of watching helicopter parents drive their children to anxiety overload. I’m sick of the rankings undermining American competitiveness by incentivizing institutional behavior that privileges the privileged, undermines equality and fairness, and diverts schools’ priorities from educating students to fudging figures. Am I just ranting here? Maybe. But I try to back it up with some more meat in my op-ed on the Huffington Post today. Check it out. Beef up the comments section at HuffPo with some CP love.

By the way Jim, IvyGate's trying to get in Lee Bollinger's pants.

Reader Comments

Hypocrisy?

By Doktor Jung Freud Lacan Aug 17th 2007 at 10:38 pm EDT

You write that you are "tired of this shit," yet you also say that this "was the day we've all been waiting [for]." This suggests that, far from being purely against the rankings, you have a perverse, Janus-faced attitude toward them. On the one hand, you are upset because the rankings have ill effects and because your school is number three, not number one (oh, the horror!). Yet, you could not wait for this day- you eagerly anticipated the rankings. Thus, in your mental cosmos, the object of disgust is, perversely, an object of obsession and indulgent fascination.

Without universal health insurance in this country, I am afraid you will have to pay me for my psychoanalysis of you :)

Amen.

By Liberaltarian Aug 18th 2007 at 12:36 am EDT

Perhaps the one institution that cares about those rankings more than undergrad is law. I did one hellish year of law school, and my god, the drama that little list caused was unbelievable. Duncan Kennedy has some great passages about the hierarchy of law schools -- and how it's 1) unnecessary, 2) counter-productive, and 3) not inevitable: Link

I'd certainly recommend it as required reading for any lefty thinking about law school.

HTML

By Ben Regenspan Aug 18th 2007 at 1:55 am EDT (Updated Aug 18th 2007 at 1:56 am EDT)

You think you're so fancy, Zach, with your Arianna Huffington blog and Free Foodathon championship. And yet somehow you still manage to omit the "http://" from the beginning of your URLs. Without this protocol specifier, you might as well be talking about gopher ( Link ) or ftp or somesuch, as far as any web browser is concerned. But I guess they don't care about such trivial matters as properly-formed HTML at Huffington's fancy cocktail parties.

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