Campus Watch

Yale is dead.

That, at least, is the conclusion reached by an article in this month's issue of GQ magazine.

The eight-page article, written by 1976 Harvard graduate John S. Sedgwick, alleges that Yale has lost much of its prestige.

While in the past Harvard and Yale were synonymous with each other--in greatness--this is no longer true, Sedgwick reports.

"By all accounts, Harvard now stands alone at the top," he writes.

The piece identifies a myriad of problems that currently beset Yale--including physical decay of the campus buildings and facilities, the deadly urban environment of New Haven and a faculty that is "gradually but surely losing its luster."

Understandably, Yalies were not happy about the article. The Yale Herald, a weekly students publication, satirized the article in its April Fools Day issue.

The mock article says that Yale administrators are considering moving the university out of New Haven and perhaps creating a "Euro-Yale."

"Yale to Leave New Haven Next Year" blares the fake headline. And a sidebar on the front page reports: "Yale buys out GQ."

The Harvard-educated Sedgwick has also been accused of bias because of his alma mater.

In a phone interview yesterday, Sedgwick called such allegations "about as silly as silly can be."

He pointed out that he also wrote the notorious, and highly critical, "Beirut on The Charles" piece about Harvard Law School. That article ran in the February 1993 issue of GQ.

Sedgwick said that the inspiration for his Yale article came from a women who rented a room in his house in Newton, Mass., but taught at Yale.

The woman, who is an assistant professor, commuted to Yale and stayed there a few days a week.

"I though that was pretty remarkable, that someone who teaches there...preferred to live three hours away," Sedgwick said.

The author said his interest was furthered by newspaper accounts of trouble at Yale--including controversy surrounding the 1992 resignation of former Yale president Benno Schmidt.

Sedgwick researched his article this fall and spent a week at Yale talking to students and faculty.

In addition to providing many damning statistics about the New Haven school in his article, Sedgwick cites several instances of physical erosion on campus, such as the caving in of a lecture hall roof. He also characterizes New Haven as a "war zone."

In yesterday's interview, Sedgwick noted that no one challenged the central points of his article.

"If there's one thing that confirms everything I said about Yale, it's the fact that the only thing people could say back was 'Oh, of course, you went to Harvard,'" he said.

The rest of the media has not treated Harvard as kindly as GQ did.

The 1994 U.S. News and World Report rankings of the best graduate schools dropped Harvard Business School from its number one position to third place, with formerly sixth place MIT taking the second spot.

Stanford Business School took first place in the survey, which was based on a combination of four categories: student selectively, placement success, graduation rate and reputation.

Stanford's 1993 acceptance rate was 14.2 percent, compared to MIT's 20.6 percent and Harvard's 16 percent. The median starting salary for graduates of all three schools was $65,000. The Business School scored 99.1 out of 100 in the magazine's overall point system.

Harvard, however, continued to rank first in its reputation among CEO's. This category was determined by two surveys, including one of 2,000 CEO's from the largest U.S. corporations who were asked to select the country's top 25 business schools.

A spokesperson at the Business School's public information office said that published surveys have negligible impact on applications or the school.

In the rankings of other graduate schools, Harvard was first in the categories of research-orientated medical school and architecture, and second in law and public health. The engineering program took twenty-sixth place.