Grinnell College Moves Up In Rankings After Marshalltown Columnist Calls Us Communists
By Chase on Aug 21, 2007 in Media, Rhetoric
Proof that officials at top-tier liberal arts colleges across the country don’t read Marshalltown Times-Republican columnist Ken Black, who recently called Grinnell College “a bastion for those with communistic tendencies,” my alma mater bumped a few spots up in the US News Rankings. (You know, the definitive college rankings that everyone is fascinated by, even if they also pretend to hate them.)
Grinnell is now tied with Clairmont McKenna, Vassar, and Wesleyan (University).
I tell people the truth when they ask me why I went to Grinnell from suburban Palm Beach, Florida: I saw Grinnell in the US News rankings and, having never heard anything about it before, decided to apply. I’m happy I did, and I’m happy Grinnell was high enough on the list for me to see it. The practice of ranking colleges is certainly not an exact science, and schools definitely game the system; but in the end the rankings are still useful on some level, and clearly all the people who obsess over the numbers agree.
Oh, and the President of Coe College says US News is “dead” to him. I just thought that was worth reporting.
Chase Martyn observes and analyzes politics from Des Moines, IA, capital of 2008's first caucus state. He is also Managing Editor of the 
Causation is not correlation. Or something like that. Guess that degree isn’t worth as much as we thought.
This post’s title is a bit funny because it seems to suggest that Grinnell moved up BECAUSE Black called us Communists. I know you wrote “after” as a time signifier but it doesn’t read that way entirely. …Maybe if Black tries to smear us again, we’ll go even higher, so perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining…
Ben Weyl | Aug 23, 2007 | Reply