I was on the faculty of the math department at Dartmouth for 4 years. Dartmouth has a wonderful department, full of smart, engaging people doing great work. One of the things I liked best about the department was that the local culture strongly values teaching in addition to research. That's true of the College as a whole, but I think it's particularly true in math.

One of the most interesting features of the graduate program is a summer-long teaching boot camp in which grad students learn theory of pedagogy, develop curricula, lecture to each other and get lots of feedback, have themselves videotaped teaching so they can study their delivery, and teach in the local high school. I have never heard of any other graduate program that does anything remotely similar. At NYU, we were thrown into the classroom on our own with no preparation whatsoever. Only if people were really terrible was there any "training," and that consisted primarily of having a less terrible graduate student observe your classes and give you some feedback.

In the eyes of US News's grad school rankings, however, all this effort and innovation gets boiled down to a single number between 1 and 5 that somehow encompasses everything that everyone is doing. My take is that their rankings tend to emphasize primarily research output. While Dartmouth has some really good people, they do spend time on things other than writing papers all day. It's not Princeton or Harvard, so in the eyes of US News, it's not a 5.0 (I have no idea what the actual US News number is). The real problem is that US News (and other ranking systems) boil everything down to a single, 1-dimensional scale. And that scale doesn't pick up different kinds of strengths.

One of the things that I'm hoping to achieve with the Graduate School Guide is to help people find programs that have strengths other than just the traditional cranking-out-tons-of-research. Only a handful of PhDs end up in positions where they do nothing but research, and it's important that the available training reflect that reality. I'd like to see programs like Dartmouth's be top-ranked given at least some people's priorities.

I tried to explain all this in a phone interview with a writer for The D, the student paper at Dartmouth. And what comes out? A story that talks about a former Dartmouth professor named "Geoff Parker" who says that Dartmouth does not have a "top-tier department". Yeah, thanks. Nice talking to you, too. Sigh.

So to any of my former Dartmouth colleagues who may be reading, I think you're great. Sorry about the article.