 | The Cavalier daily Tuesday, January 5, 1971 |  |
14 Departments Rated Above Average
By Kip Klein
Fourteen departments of the
University's Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences are above average and four were
given the highest rating by the American
Council of Education.
The study, entitled "A Rating of
Graduate Programs," judged a total of
130 institutions in 36 fields on faculty
quality and the effectiveness of the
doctoral programs. The institutions were
rated by roughly 6000 faculty members
of various universities across the country.
To be eligible for the study a school
must have granted at least 100 Ph.D.'s in
two or more fields over the past ten
years.
The four departments receiving top
rating are English, rated ninth in the
country; history, rated 23; mathematics,
rated 23; and developmental biology, rated 27.
The six departments included in the second
rating category considered as "good" faculty
quality and program, are astronomy,
economics, physiology, political science
(government and foreign affairs), and zoology.
Eight departments that ranked in the third
category, considered more than adequate are
chemical engineering, chemistry, French,
microbiology, pharmacology, philosophy and
psychology.
"It is important to remember that this
survey is a poll of what people think about a
department, not an in-depth study of what the
department actually is. According to the
authors, it is intended to show universities in
quality ranges, not in any specific pecking
order," said Dean Whitehead, dean of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Upon publication the survey was promptly
attacked when President Lloyd II. Elliott of
George Washington University challenged its
"questionable methodology and narrow scope."
Two spokesmen for black higher education
assailed it for excluding Howard University and
other predominantly black schools.
According to the study Harvard University
and the University of California at Berkeley
retained their reputations as the top schools for
graduate studies programs with Harvard ranking
first or tied for first in 14 fields and Berkeley
ranking first in eight fields.
Other distinguished institutions in the study
were Stanford, Chicago, Yale, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Michigan, Princeton,
California Institute of Technology, Wisconsin,
Illinois, Columbia, and Rockefeller in that
general order.
| The Cavalier daily Tuesday, January 5, 1971 | |