Ouch.
Princeton is the 12th best university in the world, according to the U.S. News World's Best Colleges & Universities rankings released June 18.
Princeton was #2 (behind Harvard) in the rankings of U.S. colleges and universities that the magazine releases each August. But in this ranking of all colleges and universities around the globe, Old Nassau comes in at #12, behind Harvard, Yale, Caltech, Chicago, MIT, Columbia and Penn. Penn? Yes...Penn.
What gives, U.S. News?
These questionable rankings "enable our readers to understand more fully how well American institutions perform when compared with other institutions of higher learning around world," the news outlet says. They've determined that 25 percent of the top 400 universities in the world are found right here in the US of A.
What exactly goes in to these rankings? Scores on "Employer Review, Student to Faculty, International Faculty, International Students and Citations per Faculty." Whatever all that means.
Here's a list of the Top 20:
1. Harvard, USA
2. Yale, USA
3. University of Cambridge, UK
4. University of Oxford, UK
5. Caltech, USA
6. Imperial College London, UK
7. University College London, UK
8. University of Chicago, USA
9. MIT, USA
10. Columbia, USA
11. Penn, USA
12. Princeton, USA
13. Duke University, USA
13. Johns Hopkins, USA
15. Cornell, USA
16. Australian National University, Australia
17. Stanford, USA
18. University of Michigan, USA
19. University of Tokyo, Japan
20. Mcgill University, Canada
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Princeton No. 12 in U.S. News (world) Rankings
Einstein's tongue photo goes for $74K
Turns out someone paid $74,324 for this "iconic" photo of Albert Einstein taken in March 1951 on campus as the renowned physicist celebrated his 72nd birthday. Rumor has it that photographer Arthur Sasse asked Einstein to pose with a smile for the photo, but instead Einstein stuck out his tongue. He loved the photo so much that Einstein had nine prints made for it.
Turns out someone else loves it too. Because on Friday, the photo was purchased for a cool $74K from RR Auction, a New Hampshire auction company.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
The Mysterious Departure of Booster Juice
According to students on campus, the Nassau Street shop, which is part of a Canadian franchise, was plastered with yellow paper and did not open on June 8 or any day afterwards.
"I don't know why Booster Juice closed, but I kind of saw it coming with the opening of Twist and the very long winter when no one ever wanted a smoothie," Mark Lock '11 said. "Its location is also quite far from central campus and nearer to the E-Quad people who are absolutely non-smoothie drinking people."
Last month, the store did indeed have long lines and at least two employees working in the store, making its sudden departure quite baffling.
--Tasnim Shamma '11
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ken Starr supports Sotomayor '76 nomination
He is famous (infamous, some would say) for his investigation of the last Democratic president, but former independent counsel Kenneth Starr is backing the Supreme Court nominee of the current Democratic commander-in-chief.
On Thursday, Starr said he "thinks very well" of Sonia Sotomayor '76 and "supported the nomination" after a speech in LA, according to the Washington Post.
Starr, who is dean of Pepperdine University Law School, has served as a federal appeals court judge and U.S. solicitor general. Then he investigated Bill Clinton's dealings in Whitewater and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky...an investigation that eventually got the former president impeached.
Faculty couple wins Japanese Nobel
It's often referred to as the Japanese Nobel, and early this morning, Peter and Rosemary Grant got a phone call with news that they had won it.
The faculty couple is the recipient of this year's Kyoto Prize for Basic Science. The Inamori Foundation, which awards the prize, praised the power couple for their research in the Galapagos Islands that's produced some of the most important contributions toward evolutionary biology since Darwin.
The Grants are world famous for their study of "Darwin's finches" at the Galapagos. Their work became widely known after it was highlighted in Jonathan Weiner's 1994 work "The Beak of the Finch," which won a Pulitzer Prize.
The prize, founded in 1985 and honoring lifelong achievements in basic science, advanced technology, and arts and philosophy, includes a $500,000 award for each category.
Both Grants came to Princeton in 1985. Peter is an emeritus professor and former chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Rosemary was a senior research scholar at the University before she retired last year.
The Grants will pick up their prize and the $500,000 check at a ceremony in Kyoto this November.
UAlbany coach interested, then not, in men's lax job
Turns out Scott Marr doesn't want to come to Princeton after all.
On Thursday night Fox23 News in Albany, N.Y., reported that Marr had been contacted twice by Princeton and had a phone interview scheduled for late this week. Marr confirmed that he'd submitted an official application, saying he was "honored to be contacted about the job."
But TODAY, all that changed. Marr called up Fox23 and told the news outlet he's withdrawn his name from consideration. Turns out he did have that phone interview, but talked it over with his family and decided to stay put.
BACK to the drawing board...
Monday, June 15, 2009
College News Round-Up 1
School may be out, but colleges around the country are making news.
The governor of Illinois has appointed a panel to investigate the role that intervention by state lawmakers and university trustees may have played in acceptances to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.
Clemson University appears to be the most recent battle in the ratings war. The president of Clemson's peer review scores, which account for a quarter of a college's U.S. News and World Report score, classifies only Clemson's program as strong and lists more than half of the universities in the survey as having marginal programs. This has raised questions about "gaming" rankings and the quality of ranking programs all together.
Finally, for those of you engaging in work for no pay, Slate's The Big Money has a story about the rise of the intern.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Take Home Final
While travails of your finals can seem cinematic at the time, rarely is the Princeton exam period set to film. One half-hour student film made last year did just that with “The Take Home Final.” Written and directed by Robert Gati ’08 and starring Max Bradley ’11, Dave Uppal ’08 and Erica Duke ’08, "The Take Home Final" has elements of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" and tells the story of Gary Klondike and his quest to finish his take-home final and avoid expulsion.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Lost in the Meritocracy or Part of the Meritocracy? A Review
Parents of aspiring Ivy Leaguers have bought Ivy League tell-alls ever since elite universities first touted themselves as meritocratic. These books, the idea goes, provide two types of information for the discerning parent. First, the memoir style gives readers the specific details of how an individual--usually a self-identified outsider--gains admittance to an elite college. This forms a benchmark that parents can obsessively compare their own children to. How many AP classes did the author take? What was his SAT score? Did he play a sport or an instrument? Second, the tell-all serves as a Consumer Reports brief on the stuff the university admissions office wants to keep secret. Stuff like secret societies, all-male finals clubs, sexual harassment, and drunken festivities.
One increasingly popular task of the Ivy League memoir is to dispel the myth that these institutions cultivate intellect. Instead, these books proclaim, these schools cultivate snobbery, cutting corners, and networking. Ross Douthat's 2005 memoir, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, proclaimed that classes were the easiest thing at Harvard. Getting into a finals club was the real challenge, one that required confidence, the right clothes, and effortlessness--not knowledge.
Walter Kirn's book on his schooling from Minnesota public schools to Princeton University, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, published on the eve of Kirn's 25th Reunion, is presented in the same myth-busting vein. His publishers have touted Kirn's Princeton as an "arena for...social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use."
Indeed, Kirn portrays himself as an outsider who landed at Princeton as a fish out of water. Nevermind the fact that his father went to Princeton, something that Kirn tries to brush off as irrelevant since his father never took pride in his Princetonian status. Kirn was a transfer student from Macalester College, and from his experience, it's easy to see why Princeton decided to stop accepting transfers. He was miserable as a sophomore living in Wilson College, "the ugliest cluster of buildings on the campus and the home to an inordinate number of glum-looking black and Jewish kids." Kirn, however, was roomed with some bona fide heirs and heiresses hailing from New York who would enjoy expensive champagne and nice furniture and then asked him to pay for it. Kirn eventually found his place as a member of Terrace Club, where "screwballs and misfits line up with plastic trays for veggie burgers and canned fruit salad."
But even with a social niche secured, Kirn's education was not. Though he took classes with such venerables as Dr. R--presumably Neil Rudenstine, whom he thanks in his acknowledgments--most of his coursework was an exercise in pretentiousness. "Boldness of execution was what scored points," Kirn says of papers. "With one of my professors, a snappy 'heuristic' usually did the trick. With another, the charm was a casual 'praxis.' Even when a poem or story fundamentally escape me, I found that I could save face with terminology, as when I referred to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land as 'semiotically unstable.' By this I meant 'hard.'"
Though filled with snappy sentences, Kirn's characterization of Princeton is neither new nor wholly accurate. Like other college-memoir authors, he resorts to sweeping generalizations. According to Kirn, there are four major types of people at Princeton: "Those Who'd Been on Sailboats," or New England prepsters; "Those Who Strove to Serve Mankind," Woodrow Wilson School students who possess a certainty rare amongst 20 year olds; "Those Who Never Raised Their Eyes," the equivalent of computer science majors who play World of Warcraft all the time; and "Those Who Pursued Disintegration Fully," recreational drug users who then turn into five year seniors.
Yes, Kirn is writing about an older Princeton, but even then, could its students really be reduced to such stereotypes? Where were the minorities, the actual intellectuals, and the people on financial aid? Kirn would gladly place them all into a fifth category of "misfits." But even Kirn's acquaintances were more three-dimensional than his broad categories. His friend/girlfriend Nina was some what of an artiste who had a masochistic view of feminism. She was clearly wealthier than Kirn, but he never explores the dynamics of that relationship.
At the same time, Kirn's unique anecdotes are a little too special. Kirn's was by no means a "typical" Princeton experience--if such even exists. He was a transfer student at a time when the University admitted 20 a year. Parents don't need to worry that when they send their kids to Princeton, they'll end up doing coke in an Upper West Side apartment while trying not to disturb Truman Capote, the eccentric upstairs neighbor.
Even if the book fails to illuminate any new insights about Princeton, Kirn does shed light on a failure of the American education system as a whole through his account of his pre-Princeton education. In our current "meritocracy," what passes as merit-worthy are a series of high scores on standardized tests, the ability to win spelling competitions in elementary school, knowing how to get A's playing to a teachers' interests, and winning poetry contests by artfully mimicking others. Above all, the meritocracy awards the ability trick others into believing in you. Kirn uses this skill throughout his book. Though filled with many entertaining anecdotes, the book ultimately does not grapple the larger questions. Kirn doesn't question where his ambition came from, or why it's inherently dangerous for a meritocracy to base itself on percentiles and SAT scores.
Perhaps Kirn is avoiding these questions because he doesn't want to know the answers. After all, he is a product of the meritocracy. He did well on his SAT's, went to an elite university, and is now a successful writer. Kirn, like any self-respecting Princeton alumnus, would hate to think that his success was based on a game who's rules were in his favor.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Oink!
If you haven't seen it on the University's main site, swine flu has landed. Thank goodness most of us are off campus already. Let's just hope it doesn't come back this Fall.
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