We're #1!

This has been old news for a few days now, but the Princeton Review has released it's Party School rankings for the 2013-2014 school year and the Mountaineers of West Virginia have been dethroned as the top party school in the land by none other than our very own University of Iowa.  The local press has been having a field day with this (Jimmy Kimmel weighed in with this- which managed to be decently funny and not make any stupid jokes about farms and/or the Midwest) and of course, with 21-only back on the ballot in November, the ranking has injected itself into that particular debate as well.

Hmmm... so just how big of a deal is it?  I think it depends on your point of view.  Some anti-21 folks are doing cartwheels:  despite all the efforts of the University administration and the City Big-Wigs, we still party and party hard.   All these attempts to control binge drinking and grind the college experience into dust under the iron bootheel of the Metamucil chugging Old Fogies that are our town elites have come to naught, so let's axe the 21-only ordinance and be down with it anyway.  And oh, by the way- pass me a beer.

The pro-21 folks are dismissing this as meaningless fluff, which it more or less is.  I think people see 'Princeton' next to the word 'Review' and automatically assume that this is a rigorously academically designed thing.  With peer review, multiple metrics to analyze and control groups or something to boot.   It's not:  essentially, they send out a shit-load of surveys and analyze the responses they get.  So whichever student body has the highest response rate could, conceivably skew the results whichever way they want.  This isn't exactly the kind of stuff you find in The Chronicle for Higher Education.

What do I think?  Well, I have to admit, I'm sort of proud and sort of puzzled all at the same time.  Back in the day, this school could thrown down with the parties.  Hardcore.  I remember the pig's head being thrown on the field at Kinnick.  I remember the old Lot 6- before they built the ramp on top of it to try and control the mayhem you found there.  I've heard stories of dorm wars so bad that they had to bring a front loader in to clear glass on the street.  Things are nowhere near as bad as they used to be- in fact, you could argue that things are pretty damn vanilla compared to years past.

So the fact that we achieved this ranking is sort of a win for everybody- unless you assume that the basic notion of wanting to change the drinking culture on campus was to make sure we don't get these kind of rankings to begin with.   But to me, it's a win all around.  21-only works.  It didn't destroy the college experience.  People still party.  People still have fun.  This is Iowa, baby.  You can get a fantastic education AND still have a good time.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit back, relax and crack open a cold one and toast the one thing that matters most to me in this whole debate:  job security.