AMSList Discussion of the NRC Report

This is a complete transcript of the discussion of the NRC's Report as it took place on the Internet mailing list of the American Musicological Society (AMSList, subscribe at listproc@ucdavis.edu), where the va lidity of the whole rating process came under discussion.

Although this mailing list is semi-public, I sought permission from all these individuals correspondents to post this transcript here. All the individuals whose names and words appear have given me their explicit permission to re-publish their words. T he names of those who have not have been taken out of the headers, and their words have been paraphrased.

Beware, however — the document with the message text is over 130K, so it will take a long time to download over a slow connection to the Internet. If your browser doesn't cache downloaded documents, this could be very painful!

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The messages are listed in the file in chronological order, but the listing below maintains the "threaded" order (unless I've made an error):

• Theresa Muir's first message to the list, pointing out the fact of so many public institutions in the top 10 (9-16-95)
• Theresa Muir's second message, giving the rankings for music (9-16-95)
• David Fenton's followup listing the effectiveness ratings, questioning what the rankings mean, and giving the URL for the National Academy Press (9-16-95)
• Theresa Muir's response defending CUNY's honor (9-16-95)
• Scott Hale's response making some sense out of the numbers reported in the Times
• David Fenton's response pointing out a problem in Scott's explanation (9-16-95)
• Michelle Dulak's solution to the problem (9-16-95)
• Scott Hale's observation on the problem (9-16-95)
• Elizabeth Randell's clarification of some problems alleged by David Fenton that aren't actually problems (9-17-95)
• Bill Meredith's followup asking what these ratings really mean, and likening them to beauty contests (9-16-95)
• Larry Solomon's response agreeing and adding that he thinks ratings like this are silly (9-16-95)
• Robert Fink's response further drawing out the beauty contest analogy, and pointing out that the positive ratings can be used by the lucky programs to improve their situations within their institutions (9-17-95)
• Barbara Hampton repeats her observation (made at a later place in the thread) that CUNY has a relatively small endowment in comparision to the other top-rated schools (9-19-95)
• Ron Pen's followup explicitly comparing the ratings to the Miss America pageant, and pointing out how two different students at one institution might have completely different experiences (9-16-95)
• Paul Attinello's defense of such ratings as having at least some utility (9-16-95)
• Elizabeth Schwartz's response pointing out the degree to which individual interests of a student and the specializations of a department can be more important than "reputation" (9-17-95)
• Fred Maus's response seconding Elizabeth's suggestion, and pointing out how small a role "reputation" plays once the real application process begins (9-17-95)
• David Lieberman's response disagreeing with any minimizing of the financial end of graduate school (9-17-95)
• Paul Attinello's response to Elizabeth musing on the intricate combination of rational and irrational sources for our opinions of schools (9-17-95)
• Mitchell Brauner's disagreement with Paul Attinello's defense of the ratings, also bringing up the question of departments not on the list (9-18-95)
• Theresa Muir writes about her dismay over all the negative comments about the ratings (9-16-95)
• David De Angelo's observation on a possible double standard when it comes to the New York Times (9-16-95)
• Barbara Hampton's clarification that it is the NRC that is responsible for the rankings, not the New York Times (9-19-95)
• Vivian Ramalingam's suggestion of an artistic use for the ratings (9-17-95)
• Ian Quinn reduces the discussion to an issue of who thinks the ratings are good or not to which institutions got a high rating or not (9-18-95)
• Karen Ahlquist's response citing an example of a circular rating system in another discipline, and remarking on the power of reputation in enhancing credibility (9-18-95)
• Vivian Ramalingam's response asking about the potential for judging work by its institutional origins instead of on its merits (9-18-95)
• Theresa Muir's reponse relating the pleasant effects of CUNY's having been rated better than she expected (9-18-95)
• Barbara Hampton's followup pointing out the relatively small endowment of CUNY in comparison to the other "top ten" institutions (9-19-95)
• Fred Maus's response pointing out that in some sub-disciplines, the reputations of scholars can be quite independent of the reputations of their institutions (9-19-95)
• Lyle Neff's observations about the Chronicle of Higher Education listings, implicitly pointing up a possible weakness in the NRC ratings (9-18-95)
• Maureen Buja's response pointing up some of the questions one should really ask to determine the effectiveness of a program (9-18-95)
• Andrew Stiller's response explicitly drawing out the issue of the diversity of educational endeavors taking place under the "music umbrella" (9-19-95)
• Jim McCalla's response relating difficulties in dealing with adminstrators on this very issue (9-19-95)
• Jonathan Glixon's posting of the entire list of 65 programs, with both "quality" and "effectiveness" ratings (9-19-95)
• Ellen Burns's suggestion that we not be passive about these ratings, that perhaps the AMS as an organization should contact the NRC (9-20-95)
• Jonathan Glixon's followup to his posting of the list correcting two omissions (9-21-95)
• Christopher Reynolds's observation about certain kinds of programs which did not get included in the survey (9-21-95)
• David Fenton's observation about a possible error of inclusion instead of omission (9-21-95)
• Ivan Raykoff's correction of David Fenton's observation (yes, Virginia, there is a University of California, San Diego) (9-21-95)
• Steven Gilbert's clarification of UCSD's actual address in La Jolla (9-21-95)
• David Fenton's acknowledgement that UCSD exists (9-21-95)
• Paul Attinello's affirmation of UCSD's existence and merit (9-21-95)
• Christopher Williams's description of the UCSD program (9-22-95)
• Bill Meredith's proposal of some criteria with real utility for ranking programs (9-21-95)
• Bunker Clark's question about what the limitations of the survey actually were (9-21-95)
• Christopher Reynolds's surmise that the NRC report included all doctoral degrees (9-22-95)

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