Harvard #3....As If!

Our mighty Harvard has fallen. After a six-year string of aces in U.S. News and World Report's annual issue about America's Best Colleges, it has slipped.

Not to second--that would be bad enough. To third, a dismal bronze behind Yale and Princeton.

And this, after a year when Yale's students were forced out of their dinning halls onto the streets of New Haven. This, in the year the venerable Cambridge turns 150. This, after a year when Harvard won the Harvard-Yale game! The disgrace is stunning.

The hardest blow is talking with friends who go to the lesser Ivies in Connecticut and New Jersey. It's easy to pretend you don't care about the Harvard-Yale rivalry when you indisputably attend the best college in the United States. But when some podunk, half-rate magazine calling itself a news provider casts doubt upon that status--as much as you know in your heart of hearts that nothing could possibly be further from the truth--the rivalry suddenly becomes more important.

Your Yale friends, including those you lost touch with years ago, will start calling in droves and smirking: "Hey, Tom, how are you doing? Heard about those U.S. News rankings?"

To which the proper response, of course, is a polite, "No, guess I missed that issue. And how are you coping with the urban blight these days?"

Caustic inter-collegiate skirmishes aside, let's investigate the alleged "reasons" our fair school has slipped to such depths. (Or, if you prefer a less rational approach, prepare to intercept the trucks carrying the issue to Out-of-Town News this week with a sign reading, "The People's Republic of Cambridge refuses to admit within its borders treasonous materials.)

The Boston Globe indirectly provided perhaps the most obvious reason why Harvard has plummeted in the ranks: "U.S. News...dropped rankings of schools for outstanding teaching."

Well, that explains everything. If the category for outstanding teaching had stayed in, Harvard's professors, always devoted to undergraduates and willing to drop everything to meet with a student, certainly would have taken the top prize. Their sweet devotion is second to none.

In all seriousness, there is a more substantial reason why Harvard tumbled.

Bob Morse, the project's research director, said Harvard's relatively larger classes contributed to its nose dive, according to the Globe. Indeed, on the list of statistics, 9 percent of Yale's classes had 50 or more students in them; Princeton's comparable figure was 13 percent and Harvard's a dismal 21.

But really, how much does that matter? There is a certain camaraderie in piling into Professor James Kugel's "Bible" class with 900 of your closest fellow Harvardians. It makes you feel part of the Harvard experience to know that half your class has also taken Ec 10. And who would want to miss the opportunity to stare at the rafters of Sanders Theatre during class?

Admittedly, you're more accountable for material each week when you have fewer than 50 students in your class, but then you would actually be learning from a professor, rather than just attending lecture and picking up most of it on your own. That would be contrary to all Harvard stands for.

Another area where Harvard bit the dust was faculty resources, which counted for 20 percent, based on such factors as student-faculty ratio, faculty doctoral degrees, percent of part-time faculty, average salary and class size (excluding sections). We were ranked 11th; Yale and Princeton were 6th and 7th, with Caltech taking the top spot. You would think that with Harvard's "best in the world" policy of hiring faculty, we could do better than a measly 11th. Then again, U.S. News did not include faculty name recognition as a category.

Harvard's alumni are also apparently less generous than Princeton's, coming in fourth to Princeton's first. At least Yale didn't beat us on that one. But in the midst of a $2.1 billion capital campaign, one would hope that Harvard alumni could catch up.

So where did Harvard actually beat the competition? We placed first in student selectivity, based on acceptance rate (12 percent), yield (75 percent), average or midpoint SAT score (1370-1560 for the 25th to 75th percentile) and high school class standing of entering first-years. Thank goodness. At least we can still say we're the most selective (and by extension, most elitist) school in the country. That's a relief.

And we also won the retention race: the average percent of students in a school's 1986-to-1989 first-year classes who graduated from that school within six years and the average percent of first-years entering in 1991 to 1994 who returned the following fall. Even though we're number three, at least students like it once they get here.

So what do these numbers all mean? Obviously, for the past six years, they have obviously been indicators of U.S. News' supreme foresight and intuition about the state of the nation's higher education. After all, the same magazine two years ago cited the word Harvard as "the seven letters that attach themselves to your name like a foreign knighthood." We like to agree.

This year, however, we're forced to look for other explanations. The numbers are no longer infallible. We're inclined to support David Merkowitz, spokesperson for the American Council on Education, who told the Globe that "the rankings are kind of artificial."

We're convinced that the editors have a hidden agenda. They obviously weren't satisfied with Harvard's being number one six years in a row. So they decided to shake things up a bit, change things around, make the public take notice--and they decided to put Yale first and Princeton second. The ruse is made even more effective and ironic by the recent appointment of James M. Fallows '70 as editor of the magazine. (He claims he had nothing to do with the decision.)

We're confident this is all a publicity stunt to sell magazines, and that things will return to normal next year. After all, this is Harvard, and since Harvard's name is the main reason most students come here, it has to remain on top.

We're hoping that the relevant administrators will do everything in their power to put Harvard back on top next year. Pump those dollars out of the alumni. Hire hundreds of new faculty members to make the student-faculty ratio smaller. Put more classes into the Core to cut down on class size.

Otherwise, Harvard's entire premise could disappear. Prospective students might have to start ranking it on variables other than prestige and its number one status. They might actually have to look at its variable teaching quality, its massive classes, its do-it-yourself atmosphere. They might have to consider Harvard as a place, rather than Harvard as a name. And that would be just too un-Harvard for words.

Sarah J. Schaffer '97 is editorial chair of The Crimson.