We Love Rankings

The newest U.S. News & World Report college rankings are out. We now have the most up-to-date way of calling alumni other schools illiterate morons.

The rankings are stupid. We know this¹. They weight importance of things weirdly. Different schools exist for different reasons, specialize in different things, and serve different constituencies. You can't objectively rank Cal Poly against Bard College. You just can't. And rankings can't measure the ways a person can grow as a citizen of the world. I can go on and on giving reasons why this list holds no weight. I can get on board with comparing individual programs, but not entire schools.

At the same time...

Ohio University fell to 124^th, down from 115 last year. It's still Tier I. But that is completely unacceptable. 124 is nothing to shake a stick at; there are thousands of schools in the US and 124 puts us squarely in the top 1%. Expand that to the 6 billion in the world and there's zero room to complain. Bobcats are truly among the world's intellectual elite.

However, we can and should do better. We have so much going for us and to see our gradual slide down the rankings² is profoundly sad. The opportunities and surroundings OU and Athens provides are extraordinary, and there's no way 123 schools can top it. So what is causing our tumble down the educational ladder?

In a word, money. We're in a bad way. We have too many majors and too many administrators. We can't get rid of either because of a penis-size contest between the faculty³ and the administration/trustees⁴. There's no trust between either side, so they can't work together. We all suffer as a result.

Under Robert Glidden, we refurbished, acquired, and built too much and we have a lot of debt. We're caught up in the amenities arms race and have committed a ton of resources to attracting students with shiny bells and whistles⁵. Many of our dorms are crumbling and slated for a much-needed renovating. This all costs a lot of money.

In case you haven't noticed, very little of this has to do with actual education. All of these projects, combined with a sharp decline in revenue, have taken its toll. We can't pay faculty competitive salaries, so promising young professors move on. We've cut staff to the bone and beyond, so our landscape and buildings aren't maintained as well as they should be.

All this is in the face of the fact tuition is absurdly high and going up.

More than one person has suggested the problem is the trustees are treating the university as a business. It's possible, but it doesn't matter how the place is run as long as everyone has lost sight of why OU exists in the first place. That goes for the faculty, no matter how loudly they claim they have the educational mission of the university in mind. Right now, everyone is concerned about everything other than what is being taught. We need to take a step back and look at everything we're doing honestly. What are we doing? What do we need to do? What can we do without?

Ohio State has 38,479 students and about 160 majors. Miami has 14,671 students and about 100 majors. OU has 17,176 students and more than 250 majors. Do we see the logical detachment here?

There are wonderful things going on in Athens. OU is a leader in sustainability, and the school and the town has a great tradition of social awareness and activism. In learning things that can't necessarily be taught in the classroom, we're near the top of the nation. We need to climb back up the mountain in the classroom and on the ledger, too.

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1 We know this, yet we still regard them as authoritative. It's insane.

2 We're below schools like LSU, Buffalo, Dayton, and Tennessee.

3 Faculty Senate has zero problem putting a scarlet letter on athletics but will not yield a single major or program, no matter how superfluous. Also, they either need to unionize or not. Stop talking about it and decide already.

4 The powers that be have fallen into the same trap many corporations fell prey to. They hired too many officers that do too little and are either unable or unwilling to look at themselves when trimming the fat. The Board of Trustees, meanwhile, has proven itself deaf to the needs and desires of the people they're supposed to be serving. Instead, they treat the OU community as a nuisance.

5 We spent $10.4 million on Shively Dining Hall! $10.4 million!