<p>“In any case, what I find amusing in these standard and predictable attacks by advocates for teeny tinies and other schools with less eminment faculties is their dogged faith in the notion that distinguished scholars are not good teachers, and that, on the contrary, mediocre scholars are uniformly excellent teachers!”</p>
<p>You are twisting our words beyond recognition. No one is saying that distinguished scholars are not good teachers, or that mediocre scholars are “uniformly excellent teachers”. We <em>are</em> saying that the level of scholarly output by a university, as measured by somewhat superficial indicators like papers published and articles cited, does not precisely correlate with the quality of undergraduate education - rankings like these, if they purport to measure a college’s undergraduate quality (which they don’t all even claim to do), are consequently not very well constructed.</p>
<p>You haven’t even bothered to answer any specific arguments. How can a rating really measure research quality yet put Pittsburgh above Caltech? Do many people really think that Purdue and Arizona are superior to Brown and Dartmouth? If you took your usual tack, you might look at their cross-admit percentages!</p>
<p>Statements like these make me think that you have no understanding of what constitutes a nuanced, logical argument. We were not claiming that Harvard isn’t #1, but rather pointing out serious flaws in the methodologies of these studies, flaws that make them quite questionable for use on this board. You suddenly seized upon our statements and painted us as curiously dogmatic freaks who think that “teeny tinies” are universally superior to Harvard.</p>