Everybody says they don’t like polls and rankings but, like those trashy tabloids at the supermarket checkout line, you just can’t help reading the headlines. Particularly at a university, we like to think that we are above such popularity contests. But if we are honest, we just can’t help reading those “Top Ten” lists, particularly when the reports reflect favorably on the UW.
This fall the University of Washington seemed to pop up every week on the front pages as it was recognized in polls, rankings and international prize announcements. Perhaps our finest hour came Oct. 12, when not one but two UW professors won the Nobel Prize for medicine—Drs. Edmond Fischer and Edwin G. Krebs. With their awards the UW now has six Nobel laureates among its faculty and alumni.
That same month saw the Husky football team number one in the polls. No matter where coaches and sportswriters rank the team at season’s end, both will rate it as one of the best in the country.
Turning to education, this fall Money magazine ranked the UW as one of its “best college buys” anywhere in the United States. Only Rice University and the New College in Sarasota, Fla., were higher, making the UW the number one public university among the magazine’s best bargains. Another magazine, Fortune, named Seattle as the top U.S. city for business in 1992, and one of the reasons was the quality of the University of Washington and its influence on the growing biotechnology industry.
While this magazine has been singing the praises of the University of Washington for years, its nice to see our colleagues at Money and Fortune pick up our tune. (If they need any more confirmation, they ought to look at the articles in this issue about the human genome project, education reform, labor unions and a faculty environmentalist.) In the supermarket I’ll continue to laugh at the tabloid headlines, but in the office I’ll keep reading with pleasure those magazine polls and rankings, because, for once, they are telling the truth.