'Chicago Tribune' Education Poll Names Harvard Best University

A Chicago Tribune poll of 35 leading educators has named Harvard the leading American university. The Law School and the Medical School were specifically recognized as foremost in their fields.

Radcliffe was rated second, behind Bryn Mawr, among women's colleges.

Chesly Manly, who wrote the Tribune article, stated, "The unanimous (that word cannot be overemphasized) agreement of all the authorities consulted is that Harvard is America's No. 1 university.... Harvard's reputation for all that is fine in education is unchallengeable."

Yale is ranked as the second leading university, followed by California, Chicago, Columbia, and Princeton. Haverford is called the best men's college and then Amherst, Kenyon, and Wesleyan follow in that order.

Oberlin, Swarthmore, Carleton (Minn.), and Reed (Ore.) rank as the best co-educational colleges. The Tribune listed Barnard, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Smith behind Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe as the leading women's colleges.

Consulted "Objective Data"

The Tribune in making its choices, consulted "a great mass of objective data," which "strongly supported" the subjective evaluations of the academicians, the writer said.

Among the "objective data" included in the article was a chart in which each of 28 fields of study at the ten leading universities was rated as "distinguished" or "not distinguished." Harvard scored 21 distinguished departments ratings to tie with Yale for third place, behind the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.

The seven "not distinguished" fields of study at Harvard were Fine Arts, French, Geography, German, Linguistics, Physiology, Spanish and Italian. The Tribune said that "these ratings represent the consensus of outstanding scholars and scientists in each subject." The newspaper cautions, however, that the absence of a "distinguished rating does not imply weakness."

Manly's article does not acknowledge Harvard's leadership in every area of education. "California with six Nobel prize winners, has a more distinguished faculty in the natural sciences and Yale is superior in the liberal arts, both in the distinction of its faculty and the quality of its undergraduate program," he claims.

In another article, Manly pointed out the Tribune's ranking of universities is similar to one published by the American Council on Education 23 years ago in which Harvard was again first, but Yale was seventh.