<p>
As tortoise pointed out, part of it has to do with Duke’s decline in US News and Chicago’s rise. For many Duke students/alums, it’s a bitter pill to swallow going from as high as #3 to potentially falling out of the top 10, the first time it would do so in over 20 years. To see a university formerly ranked in the teens “usurp” Duke’s spot is particularly galling for them. </p>
<p>For another, the two schools are - as they present themselves - somewhat antithetical. Duke boasts about school spirit and DI athletics; Chicago boasts about the Life of the Mind. Duke is in the top 5-10 for MD applicants per capita; Chicago is in the top 10 for per capita PhD production. There are many other differences between them. Although as PMCM18 pointed out, it’s quite possible to do Chicago-like things at Duke or Duke-like things at Chicago, there is a tendency on these boards to caricature Duke students as beer-guzzling, intellectually vapid frat boys focused on nothing but making money and Chicago students as industrious, teetotaling scholars capable of simultaneously writing Chinese with one hand and ancient Greek with the other. There is also, I dare say, a tendency in both camps for people to look down upon the other.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the HYPSM problem. These five schools, and occasionally Caltech, have been worshipped on CC as a sacred and untouchable tier for as long as I’ve been on CC and probably for some time before that. Whenever a college threatens to break into this tier, it draws an intense amount of fire from other colleges. HYPSM posters dislike this because it threatens the natural order of things and their specialness; students from other colleges dislike this because they perceive that college as being uppity. Columbia, which drew fire on the Stanford board for being ranked above it last year, and Chicago, which pretty openly compares itself to Harvard, are examples of colleges that have drawn particular dislike on CC. When you have Chicago students believing that “Duke will never be in Chicago’s league” and Duke students believing that the two are peers (if not Duke as superior), there’s bound to be some conflict.</p>
<p>As for Chicago, yes, I hold it in the highest esteem. I turned it down for undergrad (poor financial aid) and grad school (too cutthroat), but it is unquestionably one of the world’s best universities, and I certainly hold no grudge against it or its students. As for Duke, I received an excellent education there and am immensely fond of it. My opinion of it is not dependent on rankings or others’ opinions, so I, for one, am not inclined to get huffy or antagonistic when others don’t grovel before it.</p>
<p>In any case, I agree with Cue that Nobels are not a particularly good way of gauging a university’s performance. Subject variation alone makes it rather difficult. For example, which of these two universities is “better”?</p>
<ul>
<li>College A with 10 Nobels each in medicine, physics, chemistry, and literature</li>
<li>College B with 25 Nobels each in econ and peace</li>
</ul>
<p>College B has more in sheer numbers and in each field, but College A has more breadth. Tough call! That’s quite aside from the issue of weighting undergrad vs. grad student, researcher vs. faculty member, etc. For example, is it more impressive to produce lots of Nobel laureates or to simply have a lot of them on staff?</p>