BY TALIA SCHAFFER

Several years ago, I witnessed Malcolm Gladwell fearlessly tell a Cambridge audience that nobody should give a cent to Harvard. Whenever I read someone criticizing Gladwell’s tendency to cherry-pick data, I remember that moment. Two of Gladwell’s recent “Revisionist History” podcast episodes (season 6, episodes 2 and 3) do reveal his characteristic research carelessness, but I’m pleased to report that the listener comes away with the thrilling experience of hearing genuine, generous outrage.

The first episode, “Lord of the Rankings” (July 1), explains the infamous US News and World Report rankings, while the second, “The Dillard Project,” uses a New Orleans HBCU as a case study. Together, they indelibly condemn the US News and World Report system – and given Gladwell’s fame, I hope that they will reach many parents of college-bound students.

“Lord of the Rankings” explains that the US News and World Report rankings began in the 1980s as a marketing ploy for US News and World Report to compete with Time and Newsweek. The assumptions and biases baked into the system forty years ago remain powerful. Gladwell particularly emphasizes the strong influence of the peer review metric, in which university presidents and other administrators are asked to rate schools about which they may well know nothing – a problem to which Robert Morse, the chief architect of the rankings, has no good answer. (Full disclosure: I spoke to Morse myself about the problems with the US News and World Report rankings some years ago, as part of Tenure for the Common Good. You can read our story here.)

Gladwell interviews a statistician and her students from Reed College who hacked the system to figure out US News and World Report’s secret algorithm (particularly satisfying, since US News and World Report famously punished Reed for withdrawing from their ratings). The numbers have real financial results. Gladwell finds that HBCUs get ranked a shocking 20 to 37% below comparable schools, which makes it almost impossible to get bonds to fund their institutions. Administrators upvote their favorite places, which means that, as Gladwell concludes, they “assign a number to their prejudice, to disguise pathology as methodology.”

The second episode, “The Dillard Project” (July 8), introduces readers to the compelling story of Dillard University. Dillard is an HBCU in New Orleans that primarily admits low-income first-generation students, who often have tumultuous, unstable, financially difficult home lives, and it gives them the support structures to help them succeed. In spite of this wonderful mission, Dillard is at the bottom of the rankings. Why?

Well, what do the US News and World Report rankings measure? Test scores, graduation rates, faculty resources, endowment, student retention, teacher-student ratio, student selectivity, alumni giving. In fact, each of those metrics is a proxy for wealth. Gladwell demonstrates that if Dillard decided to cater to rich white students, it could careen up the rankings. Wealthy students would produce an infusion of alumni donations, and those students’ relatively stable finances and access to tutors would improve test scores and student retention.

In truth, Dillard isn’t a bad school. It is a school that admits “the wrong kind of student,” in Gladwell’s devastating phrasing. As the Reed statisticians note, racial and financial factors, can predict an astonishing 91.3% of a school’s score. As someone who teaches at a school somewhat like Dillard – a school with working-class, first-generation, diverse, immigrant students – I loved Gladwell’s warm appreciation of Dillard, and I was sickened by the rotten system that cannot appreciate an institution that helps those in need.

Yet while Gladwell is powerful, he is sometimes slipshod. I don’t understand why he tried to suss out the costs of dorm buildings by talking to someone who builds luxury condos, instead of going to people who specialize in campus construction. More profoundly, Gladwell ignores the larger ways in which US News and World Report gets academia tragically wrong.

When Gladwell focuses on the peer assessment metric (20% of the whole), he finds the rankings’ racism – but if he looked at the other big category, “faculty resources” (also worth 20%), he would notice that the rankings fail to measure what really exists in today’s academia. The “faculty resources” category measures only the residual 30% of faculty earning tenure-track faculty salaries, ignoring the 70% who get starvation wages as adjunct faculty. US News and World Report continues to monitor alumni giving, even though we’ve now seen that universities would rather cut than dip into that money. Nor is US News and World Report noticing that the numbers of administrators has skyrocketed, arguably the most important factor in the cost of the modern university.

In short, US News and World Report is measuring an imagined university, oblivious to the fact that the new university is run by a top-heavy managerial corps trying to cut costs, while the real work is done by a revolving stable of underpaid gig workers.

In one of the most touching moments in “The Dillard Project,” a student described Dillard by saying that if she skipped class, her advisor would call to check on her. How do you sustain that kind of caring attention? Maybe by paying the people who work there a living wage. Dillard apparently has 74% full-time faculty. It’s something US News and World Report never bothered to check, and something that Gladwell might have mentioned.

Talia Schaffer is a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also a co-founder of Tenure for the Common Good.