If you haven’t heard by now, here is the best news your parents have gotten since you arrived on the campus: The university has been named a Public Ivy collegiate institution.
Shocking, I know. You came here expecting a good school with a rising name, good parties and oversized freshman classes. Yet you’ve been bestowed with prestige, honor and bragging rights.
It has been said that Public Ivy is just another flippant phrase thrown around by those who wish they were at the real thing — the hallowed halls of a snooty Ivy League institution. Well fear not, fellow Terrapins, this is no farce.
The list of eight Public Ivies in Richard Moll’s 1985 book, The Public Ivies: A Guide to America’s Best Public Undergraduate Colleges and Universities, was developed by researching the country’s public institutions exhibiting characteristics that make the Ivy League so great. Howard and Matthew Greene updated and expanded the list in their 2001 book, The Public Ivies: America’s Flagship Public Universities. Our school is appears in that version.
In the book, the Greenes rank schools on wireless Internet, faculty and quantity and quality of research, among other traits. I’d say, with the exception of spotty reception in some dorms, we are fine on wireless. From what I’ve seen of my professors’ hefty curricula vitae, our research is in full swing. Even the faculty are pretty bangin’ — yeah I’m looking at you, biology professor who played girl power music to get us psyched about Mother Earth and all her wonders. That was a nice move sir, a real nice move.
The updated book also acknowledges one major downside of attending a large institution: scheduling. I’d say one of the major benefits of an Ivy League education is the smaller class sizes and subsequent increased interaction with professors, so I knowingly cringed when the authors stated, “You might need to sleep outside the registrar’s building” in order to snag your desired classes. I’d say scheduling is the No. 1 downside of this university’s size, specifically because of all the restrictions placed on registration.
I understand why colleges and departments sometimes put restrictions on classes, but to account for every restriction when registering for classes, you have to compile a list reminiscent of the Transportation Security Administration’s airport restrictions Instead of “Always take off your shoes to walk through foot gunk with your clean socks/toes/talons,” it’s “make sure you don’t expect to ever make it through scheduling without hitting a giant arbitrary roadblock.”
So much about the university is changing. We’re becoming much more exclusive and expensive. We’re apparently losing almost a third of our sports teams, and should get used to being ranked among the country’s top 20 public universities. What isn’t changing are the endless and arbitrary restrictions and rules. It’s a big school, so one must weed people out somehow, but why not do so reasonably, instead of making us wail “Why?! Oh, good lord, why?” at our computer screens each spring and fall? If our Public Ivy status means we have better students, let’s hope for some better student treatment as well.
Laura Frost is a junior government and politics and journalism major. She can be reached at frost@umdbk.com.
