Just kidding, dudes. We love Cal and so can you, if only because Lothlorien’s legendary food orgy par-tay ranked up there with that one school’s annual spit-swapping bonanza and UC Santa Cruz’s furious attempts at ingesting enough weed to envelop a small hillside in pot fumes.

Radar’s thundering denunciation of the worst college in America follows under the jump.

The grand prize goes to the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, which gets docked a gazillion brownie points for being nestled on “a husk of yellowing grass in the middle of a blighted urban war zone”. This, in a city where the violent crime rate is 60 percent above the national average. Did we mention the shady administration and the repressive, ghetto atmosphere? Plus, frolicking at the beach front makes people puke.

Other winners come in categories like Most Superficial, Ugliest Campus, Most Stoned Student Body, Most Overrated, and Most Closeted. The U.S. Naval Academy scores second in that last category. Three guesses as to which one USC wins and the first two don’t count.

Notable features, handily listed for you here, follow:

• a ranking of the dumbest college courses
• the worst named schools
• a gallery of humiliating mascots (note the strategic linking).

And — this last one’s precious — America’s worst college professor. Ever.

Meet Michael Todd, professor of abnormal psychology at Arizona’s Paradise Valley Community College.

The 51-year-old had a history of trysts with undergraduates—before one of his female students overdosed on cocaine at his house.

The 19-year-old had reportedly consumed as many as 17 beers while Todd was there. Professor Todd refused to identify his comatose student to the paramedics who took her to the hospital, where she died.

Edit: The Clog’s just uncovered the true blue identity of the party feature’s writer, Connie Wang, who just so happens to be a Berkeley student herself. Connie was a prominent fixture at Cal’s very own Bare Magazine, whose launch party we attended just two weeks ago.  Dude, that’s so cosmic.

Image Source: goat5 under Creative Commons
Our annual semiscientific guide to the worst colleges in America [Radar Magazine]

In an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, UC Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel suggests that “despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.”

We like think of colleges as meritocratic institutions, open to everyone who meets the standards. However, As Karabel explains it:

bq. The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process (though affirmative action for the privileged persists in preferences for the children of alumni and big donors) as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges.

His proposed solution?

bq. One of my favorite [ideas] is a lottery. This could take the form of reserving a modest number of places in the freshman class — say 5 percent to 10 percent — for applicants who, having met a high academic threshold, would be selected at random. While the admissions office would know the identities of the students admitted by lottery, no one else — not faculty, not employers and not the students themselves — would.

The Clog’s two cents? It’s no surprise that unequal education at the elementary and high school level produces inequalities at the college level. Until we fix that, anything else is just a Band-Aid. Also, there is a place for students who can’t make it at the best schools.

The New College Try [NY Times]
Jerome Karabel [Department of Sociology]