1. pontiff
  2. To Every Ranking, Spin, Spin, Spin

To Every Ranking, Spin, Spin, Spin

By pontiff on November 14, 2007.

This morning I received a funny email from a graduate student here at UW, Nicholas Murphy, which made me laugh out loud (reproduced and linkified here with permission from Nicholas):

Subject: Times Higher Education Supplement rankings: a study in spin

http://www.topmba.com/fileadmin/pdfs/2007_Top_200_Compact.pdf

For entertainment purposes, the same news story from different university publications:

Harvard:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520741

Duke:
http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/11/13/News/Duke-Stays.13.In.Thes.Rankings-3096978.shtml

Yale:
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22370

Stanford (I particularly enjoy the terse, annoyed tone here, especially given the first comment):
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/11/13/briefStanfordRankingFallsFrom6thTo19th

BBC generally:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7083292.stm

To which I will gleefully add my own spin: the west coast of the US gets no respect, damnit!

Tags
education

More like this

Nigeria comes to Baghdad
Is Nigeria a member of the Coalition of the Willing? It appears to be, on the basis of this evidence. For background, let's go back to a BBC story on April 30, 2003: Foreign currency worth nearly $200m has been found in a Baghdad neighbourhood, the US military say. Troops found $100m and 90m euros…
Jared Diamond: GMOs and a Guide to Reducing Life’s Risks
Respected writer Jared Diamond recently published an overall excellent opinion piece in the New York Times discussing how we often obsess about the wrong things, while failing to watch for real dangers.    Jared Diamond’s Guide to Reducing Life’s Risks - NYTimes.com.   Many of us in the Plant…
World's Largest One Stop Shopping for Free Online Courses!
OpenYale courses. Looking for free, open source learning materials about any subject, from top experts in the world? I used to think that MIT's OpenCourseWare and Yale's OpenYale courses were a "one stop shopping" source for this, until I came across this stunning, worldwide, multi-lingual…
Stupid, stupid burning brightly, or how not to win an election
Ed happened to beat me to this one, which I saw on Orcinus. If you want a lesson on what not to do to get elected, here it is, courtesy of Tony Zirkle, candidate for the Republican nomination to run for a seat in his House district in northwest Indiana: Don't show up at a white supremacist…

Half the links don't work - Harvard, Stanford and BBC. You managed to get a rogue "" tag on the end of the URL of each one.

Should have previewed that... It's a rogue "&lt br /&gt" tag.