IS Harvard in decline?

Apparently U.S. News and World Report thinks so. According to this week's magazine, Harvard finished a lowly fourth place among universities in the eyes of academic deans and presidents, behind Yale, Princeton and the California Institute of Technology.

Could this signal trouble for our dear university? Remember, the Yankees finished fifth this year--and their starting pitching was much worse than Harvard's.

Surveys like this one are exercises in arbitrariness. The rankings are based greatly on the whims and impressions of the deans who are polled, with little regard for the actual capacity of the schools to do what universities are supposed to do. How does the dean of a school across the country become intimately acquainted with the Harvard experience, if she is spending her time to improve her own campus?

College Board statistics are also incorporated into the ranking system, attempting to place quantitative measures on "faculty quality" and other abstract attributes.

ANY sensible readers will dismiss the ranking as pure hogwash. There are too many examples of such surveys not taking reality into account.

For example, Stanford--a university which finished first in the same poll for a few years--was not even mentioned in the top five. Falling from first to sixth place is too far to drop in just a few semesters--was it the decline of the school's Western Civilization courses or just a heightened earthquake scare?

In another recent survey of academic deans, measuring the best law schools in the nation, Princeton won a spot in the top ten. Princeton doesn't have a law school.

That legacy of arbitrary measures and seeming inaccuracies was kept alive by this year's survey. Washington University in St. Louis finished fourth in the area of "faculty quality," while Harvard did not get into the top five.

Yes, Wash U is a good school, and there are probably several areas in which it compares favorably to Harvard. But faculty quality? Are we expected to believe that Harvard can't attract faculty members with the academic caliber of those in St. Louis?

Maybe the magazine noticed that Harvard is heisting an increasing number of visiting scholars and junior faculty from Wash U. Still, why would that school persist in calling itself the Harvard of the Midwest?

Perhaps U.S. News and World Report--affectionately known as U.S. Snooze and World Distort to many readers--shouldn't throw stones. Where would it finish in a survey of the best news magazines? Probably no better than where Harvard finished in its poll, and likely worse.

WHILE an arbitrary ranking of the "best big schools" has very little to do with where Harvard stands in reality, some of the report's other lists--namely, dropout rate and faculty quality--point out the areas where Harvard needs to improve. Each school has its own strengths, its own limits and its own areas to improve. A school billed as the world's most prestigious university should aim to live up to that reputation.

According to the survey, Harvard failed to place in the top five for student retention and faculty quality. Whatever inaccuracies may be present in the College Board statistics, the University should consider this a warning sign that it might be slipping just a little.

Harvard must take a look at its tenure policies and its attitudes toward under-graduates, which might be driving faculty and students away. Certainly, Harvard Knows that it has lost qualified professors because of departmental infighting and quirks in the tenure process. Now that the rest of the country has been notified of the unfortunate effects of Harvard's tenure policy by the U.S. News article, it's about time some improvements are made in the system.

Similarly, the nearly $20,000 pricetag here and the University's failure to forge strong ties to individual undergraduates may be driving some of the best students away.

Perhaps the threat of Harvard's decline portrayed by U.S. News was enough to send a little shock-wave through the administration and send it back to the business of being number one.

If that's the case, then the survey can do more than just provide a little comic relief.