When I arrived on campus three years ago, Newhouse III was a faculty parking lot. The Life Sciences Complex was another. DellPlain Hall’s front lawn was unobstructed by fences and bulldozers, which are now preparing the foundation for a state-of-the-art dorm. The Warehouse was a dilapidated building taking up far too much space in Armory Square, not a new resource for Syracuse University students to connect with downtown. The university’s most advanced public gym looked more like it belonged in an inner-city high school than at a major East Coast college.

But despite all these visible signs of change and progress on campus during the past three years, there is one thing that has remained consistent. SU has hovered around number 50 on U.S. News and World Report’s list of America’s best colleges. Our university lacks upward mobility among the top colleges in the country in spite of all the new buildings, dedications and promises of magical pathways that will take students downtown. The kind of development SU needs to see in order to gain more recognition is not skin deep.

The problem with SU isn’t the broad categories U.S. News ranks schools on, such as class size, graduation rate and faculty to student ratio. It’s the peer assessment – the rankings other colleges give SU – that worries me.

I can’t help but wonder what other schools think when they hear about two SU students within three years charged with murder, racially insensitive comics in the school’s student-run newspaper eight years ago or organizations being closed down by administrators who have a complete disregard for student rights.

Despite the fact that several smaller schools are rejecting U.S. News’ rankings, as The Daily Orange reported last week, these numbers hold a lot of weight with high school students serious about searching for the right college. A few dissidents aren’t going to keep people from taking the magazine seriously.

‘Diversity’ has become the buzz word on campus, criticized by administrators and frustrated students alike. But there’s no clear vision about how to solve this problem. According to the College Board, which gets its figures directly from SU, 63 percent of this year’s freshman class is white or non-Hispanic. That’s much more than half the class, and it’s far from what most would call ‘diverse.’ It’s pressing issues like this that are being taken far too lightly, and it shows by how the rest of the academic community sees SU.

For many of the problems here, nobody can point the finger at one specific person. It’s simply the social climate at SU, and it’s something a bunch of lectures and faculty committees can’t fix any time soon. It’s becoming difficult to hide the same problems people have been griping about for the better part of a decade with a shiny new building. If SU really wants to move up in the academic world, it has to start with the people.

Steve Kovach is a biweekly columnist for The Daily Orange. He can be reached at sjkovach@gmail.com.

Published on September 10, 2007 at 12:00 pm