President Neil L. Rudenstine said in an interview yesterday that he is sympathetic to the burgeoning nation-wide student coalition attempting to alter U.S. News and World Report's ranking system for colleges but will not withhold data from the magazine.

Rudenstine said he agreed with the coalition's position that the magazine's annual rankings are largely subjective and that quantitative comparisons between different colleges are generally meaningless.

"The idea that you could develop a calculus to make any sense out all of the differences between colleges is not a very helpful or promising enterprise," Rudenstine said.

Harvard College dropped from first place on the survey for the first time in six years earlier this year, earning the third spot behind Yale and Princeton.

But Rudenstine said that his opinion of the rankings has been consistent over the years, noting that he believes the ranking system is of limited value.

In fact, in the past he has refused to comment regardless of Harvard's rank.

A group of Stanford students have organized a national effort to convince colleges to withhold information from U.S. News until the magazine either abandons the ranking system or changes the system to present the top schools in a non-ordered list.

Stanford's student government passed a resolution earlier this month asking the school to follow these requests, and the administration there has responded.

Stanford's president recently released a letter condemning the rankings.

Stanford dropped from fourth to sixth in this year's rankings.

Rudenstine said he has received the letter and was impressed by it.

"He wrote the kind of letter a good, astute observer of rankings could write," Rudenstine said, pointing to the inconsistencies of the survey from year to year.

"Look at how many schools moved 10 or 15 places in this year's survey. I can't believe they've changed that much in one year," Rudenstine added.

Rudenstine said the information U.S. News uses is published by Harvard yearly through other sources, so withholding information from the magazine would be useless.

Rudenstine said that it would be more useful if the magazine published longer, more thoughtful pieces about various colleges, but guessed it wouldn't sell nearly as well as the current format.

Rudenstine said the search for a new dean of Harvard Medical School is nearing completion, and a replacement for current Dean Daniel C. Tosteson '46 will be named this semester.

"I hesitate to say we're down to one person, but we're certainly in the last stages of the search," Rudenstine said.

Harvard has also begun the search for a replacement for Vice President and General Counsel Margaret H. Marshall, who was recently confirmed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The University will likely close applications in November, and an announcement for a replacement will likely come three or four months later, he said.