cannabisnews.com: Magazine Rankings Don't Define a Campus










  Magazine Rankings Don't Define a Campus

Posted by CN Staff on September 10, 2003 at 11:23:28 PT
By Lucas Tanglen, Montana Kaimin  
Source: Montana Kaimin  

“I guess all the smoke isn’t just from the forest fires.” Let the jokes and the bragging begin — High Times (yes, they mean “high” like that) magazine has ranked the University of Montana the nation’s No. 5 counterculture college. “Hey dude, High Times totally said Missoula’s totally like one of the best places to, like, smoke.”
Don’t get the wrong idea; the list does not rank “party schools for stupid stoners,” but rather takes into account quality of education, activism levels and counterculture sensitivity. If that’s the case, we wonder why John Masterson, head of the Montana chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, dedicated half his quote in the piece to how easy it is to smoke pot here without getting arrested. But that’s not the point. UM students will be grasping onto this ranking for years to come, telling themselves it proves that UM is cooler than their friends’ colleges. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the No. 5 ranking does not make UM any different than it was last week. Rankings mean nothing. Remember last Saturday when the UM Grizzlies football team was the No. 3 team in I-AA and got embarrassed by North Dakota State, a struggling Division II team? High Times may rank UM above UC-Berkeley (No. 6), but we’re pretty sure they’d spank us in a pot-smoking/counterculture-embracing contest. Let’s consider some other recent media-assigned rankings UM and Missoula have received. Outside magazine this summer declared Missoula the No. 15 college town in the country. Given that Bozeman was ranked ahead of UM at No. 5, can anyone really take this list seriously? Spin magazine declared Missoula a top college town in 2002. Much of the credit for that rating went to Missoula’s music scene — far and away better than any other you’d find in Montana. The imminent closure of Jay’s Upstairs (Oct. 1) makes that rating obsolete. Who could forget UM’s 1999 ranking as No. 6 party school by the Princeton Review? No one, apparently, as we still occasionally hear people wearing backwards baseball caps bring it up. Go ahead, call your friends at the University of Florida, UCLA or Auburn and tell them that here in Missoula we party just as hard as they do. It was funny in 1999, but now it’s sad that some people haven’t let go. Think about it. If people here are really such big-time partiers, who gets up early every Easter morning to put on UM’s award-winning Easter-egg hunt, ranked No. 3 in the nation by USA Today in 2002. Here is the reality of these lists: Magazines randomly assign the rankings to as many schools as possible to get the publication’s name in the maximum number of campus newspapers. And we fall for it. Every time. It is an empty fad that needs to stop. So when you get into that debate about the cooler place to smoke, UM or the University of Colorado (and we know you will), try to have some ammunition for your argument apart from, “Man, who knows more about pot than High Times?” Source: Montana Kaimin (MT Edu)Author: Lucas Tanglen, Montana Kaimin Published: September 10, 2003Copyright: 2003 Montana KaiminContact: editor selway.umt.eduWebsite: http://www.kaimin.orgHigh Times Magazinehttp://www.hightimes.com/Montana NORMLhttp://www.montananorml.org/CannabisNews -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml

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Comment #5 posted by CorvallisEric on September 10, 2003 at 12:55:25 PT
Missoula
Another place it shows up is in the obscure but wonderfully readable 1995 book "A Good Place to Live - America's Last Migration" by Terry Pindell.One way Missoula really stands out: there probably isn't a comparably liberal, cosmopolitan, educated community for many hundreds of miles in any direction.
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Comment #4 posted by FoM on September 10, 2003 at 11:52:42 PT

Here's The Article puff_tuff!
http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread14540.shtml
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on September 10, 2003 at 11:36:27 PT

Thanks puff_tuff 
Now that is cool! I don't remember which article. I'll need to do a search. Oops! LOL!We're a party gang! That's rich! 
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Comment #1 posted by puff_tuff on September 10, 2003 at 11:28:11 PT

FOM, Your site
Wednesday, September 10, 2003Leaving a trail on the WebBy MIKE CUTILLO
Finger Lakes Times, NY [snip]I think the Web site I was most surprised to be a part of, though, is cannabisnews. com. Now wait a minute, it’s not quite what you think.I wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about the Marijuana Reform Party, and apparently the party gang over there didn’t take too kindly to it. They posted it on their Web site and asked for responses to it.You want to talk about being taken to task.I was called “lame” and “a bigot who thinks everybody who smokes pot is a clone of Beavis and Butthead.” Another person wrote: “Mike could stand in for Moe. Just another stooge unable to cope with reality.”http://www.fltimes.com/Main.asp?SectionID=38&SubSectionID=121&ArticleID=2245
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