Over at The Corner, John Podhoretz is giving props to US News and World Report, something he never thought he'd do "after quitting the place following a horrible three-month tenure there in 1987." Nevertheless, he says, "if the magazine's college survey has worthless academic whiners in a full-throated tizzy, it has to be doing something right."
Here's the tizzy: Michele Tolelae Myers, the president of Sarah Lawrence College, is accusing US News and World Report of making shit up. And that's because they're...making shit up. Sarah Lawrence has stopped collecting or accepting SAT scores for incoming students, and so they can't provide that information to the magazine. In the absence of this data, Robert Mores, the head of the magazine's college rankings division told Myers that they'd just "assume that the average SAT would have been one standard deviation (about 200 points) below the average of Sarah’s Lawrence’s peers." In other words, they're making up the number. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Morse confirmed the story.
So let's rephrase John Podhoretz's quote: "I have to say, if the magazine's [decision to completely fabricate numbers] has worthless academic whiners in a full-throated tizzy, it has to be doing something right." And there it is. If it angers the right people, John Podhoretz is perfectly willing to endorse the whole sale invention of facts and figures. One wonders if his employers at The New York Post and The National Review agree with this approach, or are aware that one of their employees has endorsed it, and may well use it in his columns.
