Skeptics have been peeling back the Penn State onion for several years now. In 2008, ESPN calculated that in the previous six years, 46 Penn State football players had faced a total of 163 criminal charges; 27 had been convicted or had pleaded guilty.
… [E]specially for a school of its size and budget — it has the largest campus in the Northeast and the 10th largest in the country — Penn State doesn’t match its football team’s prominence in very many of its myriad classrooms.
I took a look at the U.S. News & World Report rankings to see where the school stood. Its professional schools are barely mediocre: Business ranks 44th, law ranks 76th, medicine is so obscure that I couldn’t find it on the published list. The school is in the top rank nationally in only a handful of disciplines: earth sciences, criminology, and industrial and nuclear engineering.
Penn State’s other major strength, at least until now, was in several sub-specialties of education: administration and supervision, counseling and personnel, educational psychology, and higher education administration.
The sad irony of these rankings is unbearable.
His last sentence is a little strange. Because it scores well in counseling we shouldn’t expect its leadership to cover up child rape in order to protect its football program?
July 14th, 2012 at 7:42AM
The Penn State system took over the formerly free-standing medical school in Hershey, but it’s a long way from Happy Valley. PSU isn’t the same kind of of full-scale university as other Big 10 schools – it’s a bigger UMass, really.
July 14th, 2012 at 8:57AM
I took the irony to be that at a school with a highly ranked program in higher education administration, its own administration was such a thorough failure. Clearly, Spanier, Schultz, Curley, et al., were not taking those classes; let’s hope they weren’t teaching them, either.
July 14th, 2012 at 6:43PM
….looking for the ultimate in irony….look no further….From Spanier’s remarks to the BOT in 2009
“Ed and Helen Hintz share this belief, and last month they made a generous $5 million gift to establish the Presidential Leadership Academy, one of the “big ideas” developed for our capital campaign. This leadership development program will take a preeminent role in helping students develop the critical thinking skills necessary to lead in a changing, challenging world.
We need to prepare our students to live in a world that doesn’t operate like a cable news show, where people sit on opposite sides of a table and yell at each other with extreme positions. The truth of the matter is that in this world few things are black and white. It is in the gray areas where people must come to terms with the decisions in the workplace, in their family life, in their community, and across borders.
The Presidential Leadership Academy will help us train our future leaders to reach out and understand diverse viewpoints. I will have the great pleasure and privilege of teaching the lead seminar to each new class of 30 students. One of the things I’ll teach them is the importance of reaching out not only to the captains of industry or the leaders of the nation – but to the mail carrier, food service workers, the night shift custodian, and especially the Blackberry support person!(…no mention fo kids.) Every encounter has the potential to influence your life.
I am very grateful to Ed and Helen for their extraordinary generosity because I believe this initiative is at the core of the most important work we do at Penn State. ”
http://live.psu.edu/story/38411
July 14th, 2012 at 6:44PM
BTW, Penn State would be in a better place today if he had, in fact, reached out to the night shift custodian in the Lasch Building.
July 15th, 2012 at 2:44AM
Not to defend Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, or any other individual–but the US News rankings are a joke. Penn State is ranked “ninth among public schools and 17th overall” in federal research funding (http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/pitt-ascends-to-third-in-federal-research-funds-632661/#ixzz20fu0ziuq), and as Michael Berube, the very distinguished English professor at Penn State and current president of the MLA has noted, it has excellent departments in a number of liberal arts fields.
July 16th, 2012 at 6:04PM
..”The sad irony of these rankings is unbearable.”…
Um, PSU chemistry is ranked 3rd among public U’s. This according to the NRC:
http://www.chem.psu.edu/news-events/news/2010/10/penn-state-chemistry-ranked-in-top-ten
July 16th, 2012 at 6:54PM
THe NRC “rankings” did not assign a specific numerial rank rather it gave a band of possible ranks. The purpose this was to avoid the sort of chest thumping to which you link. to complicate matters further there were two sets of “rankings”. The regression based ranking which is referred to at the link has the band for Penn State a 6-24. The two state schools ahead of it Berkely and UIUC had bands of 1-3 and 3-8, respectively.
http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/chemistry/rank/_M______________________________________________________________U
The survey ranking gives a band for Penn State of 10-38 with five state schools ranked ahead of it.
graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/chemistry/rank/__M_____________________________________________________________U
There is too much ambiguity in these rankings for them to be meaningful.
July 17th, 2012 at 11:09AM
@Veblen, Oh, I think there’s enough there to indicate that PSU is not the vast academic wasteland that Fineman opines. Chemistry is not the only PSU program with decent NRC rankings. A lot of us PSU alums didn’t go there for the football, but for the academic reasons. It’s on top of the heap of public NE U’s in most areas of grad studies in science and engineering.
I started out as a football skeptic as a 1st year TA in 1982. I got to know a few football players in chemistry rec sessions, surprisingly they were the solid citizen types. I googled one and see he’s an orthopedic surgeon after earning an ME degree at PSU. I sure he’s aghast at the recent events.