The State of First Things, November 2010

Well, this month's review will have a different format because this month's issue is quite different.

First Things, in what we can only hope is not the first of an annual series, decided to publish a College Issue.  And the first item in this College Issue is a 38 page long College Guide with college rankings and descriptions of the schools being ranked.  And, it is, in a word, Terrible.  Or Silly.  Or Pointless.  Or one of the most absurd publishing ploys I have seen in a long time (OK, that's more than one word.).  Seriously, it is Awful, just Awful.  They decide to rank schools on three measures: academic, social and religious.  Their method for giving each school a rank (on a 50 point scale) for each category is absurd--truly absurd.  (I have spent quite  a bit of time thinking about college rankings for a research project I worked on for quite some time, so I flipped to the description of how they calculated their index numbers before I read anything else--I was shocked at how utterly ridiculous their method of evaluation was.  It was not designed by anyone who had given more than about 10 minutes of thought to how to construct an index number which would have any actual meaning.).  Then they get overall rankings by combining the goofy scores they just calculated.  The top four schools in America:  1) Wheaton; 2) Ave Maria; 3) Princeton; 4) The United States Air Force Academy.  Since 2003, when Ave Maria was founded, there has not been a single student who sat down to try to debate about which of those four schools he should attend--fortunately, First Things has weighed in to tell us how to rank those four schools.  Then the write-ups on the schools?  I just read the write-ups for the schools about which I know something (including Mount Holyoke (and Amherst, but not Smith (there was no review of Smith (grin!))))--they are trite beyond belief--you can get more information about any of the schools from any other college guide on the market.

I could go on, but what's the point?  This enterprise was so ill-conceived it boggles the mind.

The rankings are followed up by four articles about education.  The first two essays at least have an audience--Hauerwaus gives decent advice to a college student about how to think about being in college (nothing in it surprised me and I have a hard time thinking of a single student I have ever known that would have benefited from reading this article, but at least there was nothing in the article that made me wince); Eberstadt relates that colleges are, as her title says "Bacchanlia Unbound."  (Shocking to be sure--did you know there is a lot of alcohol and sex at fraternity parties???)  Then it goes downhill:  D'Souza, Starr and Garvey, presidents of Christian Colleges (King's  College, Baylor and the Catholic University of America) turn in essays about how wonderful their schools are--all three articles read exactly like the boilerplate which constitutes a university's mission statement.  Finally, Reno provides an impressionistic review of Ph.D. program in theology--I think all 10 of the people who might care about this article already knew everything in this article.

If this is the future of First Things, then it doesn't matter whether I decide to renew my subscription or not--the magazine will be dead in 2 years.

But, at least two of the book reviews were good.  David Hart has a great review of the first volume in Twain's autobiography which has some really interesting insight into Twain.  "And this, I think, turns out to have been the strange secret that was usually concealed behind Mark Twain's legendary mirth: a vision of the world marked by an utterly abysmal, utterly unrelieved bleakness."  Also worth reading was Douthat's review of Franzen's Freedom, mostly because it has some interesting reflections on the nature of the modern novel and how it differs from the old-style novel with "big, thick stories of intimate life."

But two decent book reviews in an utterly depressing issue of a magazine--not much consolation at all.