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The University of Georgia wins top honors this year as a "party school," according to The Princeton Review's annual rankings. While the college guide in which the rankings appear has many categories (and the student surveys that go into the methodology don't reflect cutting edge social science standards, to put it mildly), everyone pays attention to the party school category. A spokesman for the university issued a statement: “UGA has been on the Party School list for a while, but it’s one we prefer not to lead.... The University of Georgia takes student alcohol education programs very seriously and will continue to do so."
Another institution that makes the list went on the offensive. Bruce Benson, president of the University of Colorado, sent local reporters a memo questioning whether enough students are sampled to make valid judgments. "This blatant lack of transparency, combined with questionable research methods, causes us to question the veracity of the survey," Benson wrote in the letter to The Daily Camera. "Frankly, we would not allow our faculty researchers or our students to be so secretive in their research methods." Colorado's flagship campus at Boulder is #16 for party schools, but also earned #6 in the "reefer madness" category for pot use and #13 for hard liquor. Benson's defense may have backfired. The alt-weekly Denver Westword awarded Benson its "Schmuck of the Week" award for trying to trash the rankings. Wrote the newspaper: "Sorry, Bruce, but CU is one of the country's top party schools, and everyone knows it. That orgasm of cannabis consumption in Boulder every 4/20 isn't exactly a secret. Now, you may not be proud of that, but by bitching about how unfair the school's slotting is before we even know the actual number, you seem like you're protesting too much, not to mention giving the CU faithful several extra days to anticipate a list they probably had forgotten was even coming."
