News: The Best University? - Inside Higher Ed
"...he university's president, James F. Barker, took a very different approach in his peer assessments. Barker, too, rated his institution as "strong" -- but he gave no other university in the country that high a mark, handing out 18 "good"s (3's), 94 "adequate"s (2's), 126 "marginal"s, and 21 "don't know"s in the 2009 ranking. Because U.S. News's "national universities" category includes not only well-regarded public institutions such as the Universities of California at Berkeley, Michigan, and North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but also private universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, Barker has rated his institution more highly than all of those."
"The request from U.S. News is to measure the academic quality of undergraduate programs," Barker said. "It did not say research programs, it did not say prestige. It did not say size of endowments, or anything other than undergraduate education. And I took that charge seriously, measuring what I would think would be the full package of the undergraduate experience," including faculty-student ratio, relationships between faculty and students in and out of class ... do they spend time having lunch together.
"I believe that Clemson does that better than anyone," he said.