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<p>I hope you’re not saying Duke is as good as/better than Stanford/MIT by this, because the same reasoning could be used to say UFlorida is as good as/better than Duke.</p>
<p>LogicWarrior, let is go…</p>
<p>this is what Duke students use to rationalize why they are enrolling at Duke - because it has a good basketball team…since very few other criteria can be used to compare it to the better schools such as HYPSM</p>
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<p>ThisCouldBeHeavn, quoting this does not really mean anything. I’m sure the OP knows the average person on CC likes saying “HYPSM” and not “HYPSMD”. I also imagine the OP knows that to the average idiot, “Harvard” probably trumps all of the rest. </p>
<p>I think the OP was responding to obnoxious posters who object to “Duke” being mentioned in the same sentence as the other two, when the question as to it being <em>A</em> prestigious school which was not an Ivy League rising to extreme prominence is completely appropriate. Duke doesn’t lack so much that one can’t include it in the same line.</p>
<p>Everyone with basic knowledge knows MIT is several cuts above Duke as a technological powerhouse. Everyone knows Harvard and Yale are home to the great law schools. Nobody is misrepresenting any of these facts to my knowledge, and if they are, sure they should be corrected. I would be quick to object myself if the OP provided misleading information about Duke’s programs as compared to the others.</p>
<p>No thanks to lesdia who advertises Duke using flawed logic and misleading rhetoric.</p>
<p>Mathboy, the discussion forum is kind of like a social gathering and people converse. The OP did a socially awkward thing by posting this thread since he is going Duke. When you begin to talk about how great your school is, you are provoking people to attack it and it doesn’t matter which school.</p>
<p>You’re obviously right Professor, but hopefully people can also cool down and realize it was awkward, not malicious, and not worth dragging in annoying Duke promoters and haters.</p>
<p>I want to know more about the “real” question of the thread, or I’d not mind things getting derailed.</p>
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<p>Vanderbilt was founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt who was a pretty famous rich guy in those times, but I don’t think it’s as prestigious as any of the schools you listed though. So do you know like why that is or what makes it different?</p>
<p>^^It is awkward that the OP put Duke between Stanford and MIT, as you are
among the
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Trust me mathboy98, most of us would not be arguing with John117 if what you said was true. Here is a quote from one of his posts:
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<p>Ewho, who are you talking to… it was awkward because the OP happens to be from Duke.</p>
<h1>67: “Vanderbilt was founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt who was a pretty famous rich guy in those times, but I don’t think it’s as prestigious as any of the schools you listed though. So do you know like why that is or what makes it different?”</h1>
<p>In part, the answer is that historically, Vandy didn’t have as much appeal outside its Southern region. In the case of the few other historically prestigious Southern universities (e.g., Virgina, North Carolina), they did have more greater appeal outside their region. (I suspect that, in part, that Tennessee is perceived as more backward and less attractive outside the region than other states such as VA or NC). This historical perception has changed a great deal, however, but it’s hard to overcome those perceptions and those unis with greater prestige have a head start.</p>
<p>Jersey, but what I said there was true - the OP does know the average CC-er likes to say HYPSM, not HYPSMD. Now the OP also has some opinions on prestige - which I think are not worth discussing, because I claim that people define prestige their own ways for self-fulfilling claims. I am arguing against people who seem to believe those opinions on prestige are worth affirming or refuting, and think it’s arguing semantics until someone comes up with a real, specific statement which is definitively true or false to back some of these things up.</p>
<p>That’s enough of my venom. I’m sorry for going on about this subject, as it surely is just detracting as much from the thread at this point as those I’m criticizing.</p>
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<p>This is all great, and the Tennessee thing explains to an extent why there was a historical lack of appeal.</p>
<p>But why did a school like Chicago, for instance, get that appeal? And as another point - how did MIT rise to become such a technological giant? We can’t just be saying that lots of money plus a location that has not had history against it implies an incredible school, can we? Or can we?</p>
<p>Basically what I’m asking is that we’re seeing some evidence that money isn’t enough, and location can be important - how did the relevant factors interplay in the aforementioned cases to make the schools what they are?</p>
<p>Also, does anyone know how Chicago came to grow so renowned in the realm of economics, math, financial math? I never saw a particular reason for its math department in particular to be so godly. Hopefully this isn’t too specific a question.</p>
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Wow, you would think you would be good with logic considering your username and all…I mean that Duke is a prestigious academic institution WHICH IS ALSO a fun party school. Florida is a good school but it is not elite by any means. MIT and Stanford are very prestigious like Duke as well but they lack the fun social life that Duke has.</p>
<p>quote=JohnAdams12]esdia are you kidding again?</p>
<p>Stanford has been known as a powerhouse in Baseball for decades. It certainly is much better than Duke in football and once in a while will come up with a basketball team that is equally as good as Duke…</p>
<p>regarding the overall sports program?</p>
<p>It is not even close, Stanford has dominated Duke in this area for decades, having won the Directors’ Cup every year for the last decade and a half or so.</p>
<p>here are the latest rankings:</p>
<p>Directors Cup Standings for 2009-10 school year as of April 30, 2010
- Stanford - 962 points…
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. - Duke - 569 points</p>
<p><a href=“http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/...easestands.pdf[/url]”>http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/...easestands.pdf</a></p>
<p>you go girl
[/quote]
John, I don’t care how good Stanford’s Track or Water Polo teams are.</p>
<p>THE ONLY FIVE SPORTS THAT MATTER ARE basketball, football, lacrosse, hockey and baseball.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Stanford, it is competitive in football and baseball but it is not a powerhouse like Duke is in basketball and lacrosse.</p>
<p>[BaseballAmerica.com:</a> College: Top 25 Rankings: College Top 25: May 17](<a href=“http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/college/top-25/2010/269978.html]BaseballAmerica.com:”>http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/college/top-25/2010/269978.html)
Here you go…where is Stanford???</p>
<p>Duke is better at Stanford in Spanish, BME, English, Comparative Literature, French, Music, Religion, etc. etc. etc. I can’t wait for the new NRC rankings to come out to show all the haters out there how close Duke is to HYP.</p>
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What percentage of Duke students do those majors cover in total? Exactly.</p>
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MIT and Stanford are more prestigious than Duke. “Fun social life” is subjective. For someone insulting another poster’s logical skills, you are quite fond of hypocrisy.</p>
<h1>73:</h1>
<p>Mathboy, those are all very interesting questions. I think you’re quite right that it takes more than money. In some cases, I think it was a particularly dynamic university president who set a school on the right track. </p>
<p>Chicago is almost a unique situation. From the very beginning, it was envisioned as a graduate research university in the Johns Hopkins mode, which itself was modeled on the great German research universities. Even today, I believe, it has more graduate students than undergraduates. When Hutchins dropped football and established the core curriculum, it certainly continued that perception of Chicago as a serious and scholarly place. That type of curriculum is not likely to have broad appeal; by its nature, it would tend to attract a more academically-inclined undergraduate. Even the Oxbridge-style Gothic architecture of the original quadrangles reinforces the perception that Chicago is a serious and scholarly place. Chicago is an ethnically diverse city and I even suspect that this almost “European” type of university attracted many faculty who had been educated in that academic tradition in Europe (Columbia is probably the same way). As a private research university, it established itself in some fairly esoteric fields early on (e.g., ancient Near Eastern archaeology). (I suspect that Rockefeller’s fairly devout Baptist background probably facilitated Chicago’s early entrance into fields like Early Christian literature & NT Studies). Again, this reinforced its image. . To have great doctoral programs in some of those humanities fields, a university needs great library resources. If you read the early history of UChicago, there was an emphasis on acquiring the necessary library resources, many of which were purchased in Europe as scholarly libraries came on the market. Chicago now has these resources; universities that came along later have a harder time catching up because these resources aren’t as readily available on the open market as they were when Chicago was founded. So there are many factors that converged to create and maintain Chicago’s prestige as a serious and scholarly research university. But it started with that vision to create a graduate research university from the outset. Even today, Chicago is based on the premise that the researchers and scholars are the university, not the students (though its marketing now seems to be trying to broaden its appeal to a wider range of applicants, while still holding on to its established brand image).</p>
<p>It is interesting to note, however, that in its early days, Chicago seemed to have somewhat of a split-personality. It was a football power for its time and it seemed that the “rah-rah” Big 10 style of undergrad culture had strong appeal to some of the undergrads, while the graduate/research part of the university was headed in a different direction. Hutchins finally set it on its present course when he became president.</p>
<p>It’s not unusual for a university to have such a split personality. Northwestern was considered enough of a prestigious research university that by 1917 it was invited to join the Association of American Universities. It seems though that it also tried to maintain some of that Big 10 undergraduate culture (fraternities, etc.) up until the mid-60s. It had one foot in that culture (surrounded as it is by the great Midwestern state universities) and one foot in the world of greater prestige to which it aspired. When Northwestern set out to join the ranks of the most prestigious universities you started to see some markers of this: it dropped the undergrad business school (more prestigious to only have a graduate business program), it got rid of the home economics dept, it got rid of undergrad education majors, it got rid of the geography dept., and so on. The things it dropped were things associated with less prestigious state universities, but not with the most prestigious private universities whose ranks it aspired to join.</p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure about MIT’s evolution. I think it became the powerhouse that it is today during WW II, when a lot of government-funded labs were established for the war effort. Vannevar Bush was a major player in this. I think later there also was a shift from more strictly technical education to technical education based in science principles (a shift that seems to mark engineering education at some of the more prestigious universities). During the cold war, it expanded into fields like political science and economics for which its strengths in quantitative analysis were well-suited. Still later, it moved more fully into areas like biology, but at first these were joint ventures with Harvard’s health science departments. This also coincided with changes in certain academic disciplines, e.g., as psychology shifted from a “soft-science” to a more “hard-science” focus on biopsychology, MIT’s endeavors in this area grew.</p>
<p>Finally, if you’re at Berkeley, the interesting historical question is why did the state of California set out from its early years to build such a high-level research university, but other equally wealthy and populous industrial states (e.g., New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey) did not pursue this path with their flagship state universities. At least part of the answer lies with the number and prestige of existing private colleges and universities in the Northeast (and, perhaps the historical preference for and ties of the cultural elites of that region for their favored institutions).</p>
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<p>Social life and sports have nothing to do with prestige. If they did, Florida would be well ahead of Duke.</p>
<p>Mathboy, I don’t really know the answer to your questions about the rise of math at Chicago. As for economics, this was a relatively new discipline at the time Chicago was founded. Chicago pioneered in several new social science fields e.g., it had the first sociology dept. It was easier to do this at a relatively new university. At many universities, new departments develop when there’s a enough of critical mass of people in an old department who are interested in a new area of teaching and research to split off and form a new department. So this happened at many universities, for example, as speech and journalism split off from English depts. to form new depts. and as speech pathology split off from speech (along with some inputs from people with interests in deaf education, linguistics, biological mechanisms of speech and hearing, etc.). At Michigan, psychology was a part of the philosophy dept until 1931 when it split off, long after it was an independent department at other universities. Some fields develop at a universities simply because a prominent researcher takes the lead to establish it. So, at Wisconsin, the nutrition field developed from research in biochemistry. At Tufts, nutrition became established as a field when the prominant nutrition scientist, Jean Mayer, became president of Tufts. (Incidentally, the very first Congressional earmark was the money appropriated to Tufts for its nutrition program through the efforts of their local Congressman, Tip O’Neill). Scandinavian languages and Polish became established at Wisconsin because of the influence of those ethnic groups in that State. </p>
<p>So, back to economics at Chicago: At the time Chicago was founded, the present departmental structure of universities was relatively new (and some universities were still making the transition from the old Classical, English-Modern, and Scientific non-elective curriculum tracks.) In any case, it’s always easier to establish new disciplines at new universities. If a particular university is among the first to establish a new discipline, it often can dominate in that field for many years. Success breeds success and a department sometimes establishes a “dynasty” in a field, which makes it easier to attract other top faculty and grad students. I don’t know,however, when Chicago started to shift to its well-known conservative brand of economics (perhaps, when Milton Friedman joined the dept.). As a city, Chicago has always been a national business center so it makes sense too that the university is strong in economics and business. (Although the name, Booth School of Business, doesn’t seem to have caught on the way the Kellog name has at Northwestern. Perhaps, this is poor marketing on Chicago’s part because it almost seems that the surest and quickest way to raise the prestige of a business school is to sell the naming rights to it.)</p>
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<p>Duke has a good college basketball program, but it isn’t even the best college basketball program in its own state. </p>
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<p>Nationally irrelevant in football, which is THE biggest sport in this country. Most “Duke” fans aren’t even Duke fans when football season comes around. </p>
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<p>Duke doesn’t provide it all, not even close. Duke has a decent basketball team, that’s it. Football is lacking, the location is terrible, and it has no real football team. Why Dukies don’t realize this is foreign to me.</p>
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<p>No one is jealous of Duke…trust me. Duke is decent at basketball, but that’s it. It has no other redeeming qualities. The only people that are “jealous” of Duke are those that have no knowledge of college sports in general, which coincidentally describes most Duke students.</p>
<p>Tucker Maxx (famous Duke law student) said it best: “The only good part about Duke is that it is 15 minutes from UNC-Chapel Hill.” :p</p>