CCSC and ESC both canceled their weekly meetings because of board retreats, but SGA is still around to keep the student government machine rollimg. Nikhita Mahtani reports.

Monday’s SGA meeting had a special guest, Carol Katzman, the new head of IT at Barnard fondly dubbed “VPK.”  VPK apparently just couldn’t bring herself to leave the ivory tower: she began by joking that she has “been involved with higher education since college!” She continued to ask students’ opinions about so-called ‘hot buttons’, which sparked a discussion about students’ IT problems. Some of the main issues brought up included greater wireless access, wired networks, dining, clubs, and money, with all suggestions passed along President Debora Spar.

SGA is also to meet with Barnard’s Board of Trustees next Wednesday.  The meeting will now only be between the students and the board, without any administrators attending, to facilitate more in-depth discussion. Plans have been made to discuss Barnard’s new college ranking policies. Barnard was ranked 30th under liberal arts colleges by U.S. News last year, before which it hadn’t been ranked. This causes concern for many students, some for whom the ranking would have influenced their decision to come to Barnard.  U.S. News also inadvertently entered into the fray of the eternal (well, at least twenty-six-year-old) Columbia-Barnard debate, not noting Barnard’s relationship to Columbia in the rankings.  Some expressed concern that Barnard is little known as an independent institution, but the U.S. News still ranks it as one. Read more…

Two years ago, we at Bwog lost the U.S. News and World Report’s “Paper Trail” blog’s Best [Campus] Alternative Media Outlet poll to Wesleyan after some crotchety commenters lampooned their granola-eating ways and they retaliated en masse. We lost last year, too.

This year, we have another foe: Yale. That’s right, now you have the chance to reject them.

What makes this battle even more worth fighting is that the Yale blog is based out of one single residential college. That’s like a blog for Wien (albeit a beautiful, wonderful Wien with its own library and cafeteria) winning this whole contest. Egregious. And while we lower our lances at Yale, we also set our sights at Penn State. You may have an undergrad population of six million, but we have the fervor to best you.

Vote now, vote on multiple computers, whatever it takes. You have until midnight on February 17th. Do it for Bwog, because we’d do it for you.

Tomorrow, US News & World Report will release the most important list of our time or any other: its annual ranking of the best colleges and universities.

Bwog received an exciting advance press release, the only information on which was that this year Columbia, Duke, and the University of Chicago share the 8th place spot for top universities. (UChicago and Columbia were tied for the #9 spot last year, while Duke ranked 8th.)

We look forward to seeing the rest of the list in all its schadenfreude-y glory tomorrow, and will update with the rest of the rankings as soon as we receive them.

UPDATE 11:51 AM: Full list — well, full list of the portion you’re interested in — after the jump. (Or check comment #1, because this comment foretold the future quite accurately.)

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