Submitted by anonymous, Jun 28, 2007 09:31

"You might think that the last group to embrace censorship would be college presidents." When you're writing a news article and some one replies "no comment" in response to one of your questions, is that censorship? Because that's exactly the proposed action of the group of college presidents whom you label censors. They plan on saying, "no comment" to the reputational portion of the USNWR survey. They still plan on providing the objective data that are the "main" and "financial aid" portions of the survey. "After all, they're interested in expanding knowledge, right?" If I had less respect for your time, I'd dare you to find a single journal article or presentation in higher education research that defends the US News rankings as properly executed research or "expanding knowledge". But I'll spare you the goose chase: there aren't any. On the contrary, several studies point out that the rankings are not scholarship. I'll leave it to others to determine whether the rankings are good marketing, journalism, or anything else, but good research or scholarship they decidedly are not.

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.