On University Rankings, Poorly Educated Legislators, and (the Spilt Milk of) Reputations

Its the beginning of the new school year, and we've all had the chance to look over the 2011 US News and World Report National University Rankings.  Sure, the top 10 are the same, they look (and act) like the top clubs in the British Premier League, but the rankings do not stop there.  The Tier 1 rankings go to 200.  Essentially, this is a list of the top 200 Universities in the country, even if we disregard the ultimately negligible ordering of the top 25.  These rankings, and our place in them, should matter, right?  The basic talking points have been the following: 1)  the UA fell 18 points last year, from 102nd to 120th, and 2) President Shelton has responded to the rankings with, “I just don’t pay much attention to these rankings since they are designed to favor well-to-do private schools with high dollar-to-student ratios, we have a broader mission.”  Clearly, Pres. Shelton knows that he can't complain about our meager standing, in effect, he acknowledges that we can't compete, so we won't.  He has absolutely nothing to stand on with respect to these rankings, and we all know it.  We should feel lucky to still have jobs, he might intimate, and we should thank our State legislators, our Governor in fact, for fighting to keep University funding from foreclosing on us.  And he would be right.  It should escape no one that for the last three years the "broader mission" has been staying afloat.  Yes, thank you, Gov. Brewer, we really like our jobs.

But there's also the matter of those two state bills unilaterally signed into law earlier in the summer by that same Legislature and Governor, SB1070, and HB2281.  (Again, thank you?)  If you were away for the summer, God bless you if you were, but you might have missed all the fuss these laws precipitated.  People were outraged; and other people were outraged by the outrage.  Local news coverage was atrocious, as always.  Then came the countdown to July 29.  THEN, came the ruling by U.S. District Judge, Susan Bolton, that temporarily enjoined the most controversial aspects of SB1070 from taking effect until it is ruled upon in a higher court.  The ruling, found here, reads like a Professor evaluating an undergraduate's final paper.  With the ease of an experienced educator (and as if with a red pen in hand), Judge Bolton simply thrashes the new law, publicly humiliating its authors for their failure to account for the one thing that every American lawmaker cannot neglect: the Constitution.  What the ruling demonstrated, and clearly put on display, was how sophomoric this law really was; a law ultimately written by "coasting" undergraduates just trying to get by with the least amount of work. In other words, if laws like this pass for jurisprudence in Arizona, and if this law can be dispatched so easily, so quickly, so singlehandedly, and so conclusively, then our legislators are a serious problem, and a source of utter embarassment for Arizona Universities.  Let me be clear: they are a problem/embarassment not because they choose to write xenophobic and reactionary laws, but because they couldn't write them properly enough.  They are bad lawmakers in the strictest sense of the term: they just don't know how to write laws that can withstand the scrutiny of even an undergraduate course.  And further, Gov. Brewer, the person who signed off on them, couldn't also tell the difference.  I imagine that half of these legislators once walked the halls of ASU and the UA.  And I imagine half of those actually managed to scrape by with a degree of some sort.  And I'm sure they were very proud of themselves then at their graduation as they were last May when Gov. Brewer signed that poorly written bill into law, in effect, giving that bill an "A", when it deserved to be sent back to be rewritten.  Had Brewer proofread that hastily produced 'final paper,' she might not have had to face the humiliation of a federal judge telling her that law isn't worth the paper is was printed on, and that its authors are some of the most poorly educated lawmakers she has ever had the displeasure of dealing with.  But again, Brewer can't tell from poorly drafted laws.

I admit, I delighted in witnessing the humiliation on display that day.  As I did the next day, watching Brewer on the news desperately trying (and failing) to answer questions about the ruling, the language and concepts of which, of course, she just didn't understand.  Again, I was watching an undergraduate trying to defend the merit of a paper that had been given a failing grade; she just will never understand how it got an "F". Yet, I cannot also deny that, simutlaneously, I too felt embarrassed and humiliated by the entire course of events, and for everybody. I somehow felt that, much to my disgust, the UA and its "broader mission" had a role to play in all of this.  That we, in effect, also failed everybody involved.

I am suggesting that these moments (and their aftermath) are not unrelated.  That the UA "doesn't pay much attention" to nationally recognized standards and instead chooses to indulge in its own "broader mission" has been the UA's problem for a long time; meanwhile SB 1070, HB 2281, the Legislature, and Gov. Brewer are the blowback of these undeniably lesser standards and will for some time strike at the core of whatever criteria the UA wants to judge itself by, because they have inextricably become part of our reputation. The credibility of an UA education was once at stake, all doubt has since been removed.  There is no longer any ground upon which to contest our lot.  Despite Pres. Shelton's desire to avoid comparisons, we cannot opt-out of these national rankings even if we wanted to, and I'm glad for that.  Because we fully deserve our ranking as we must also assume full responsibility for our poorly educated Legislature and Governor.  But we still really, really do like our jobs, Gov. Brewer.  Thank you for supporting Education.  And believe me, we regret not having returned the favor.