If you ask an admissions office about college rankings, you’ll get a version of the brush-off response: “We don’t think an education at our school can be summarized by a ranking system” or “We don’t pay attention to rankings.” Yet year after year, Cornell compiles and submits its statistics for the rankings whose importance it will ultimately deny.

This is because, in spite of the fact that the rankings may not be indicative of the quality of education at a given institution, they matter to high school students. They matter to college students. And they matter to Cornell students most of all.

To some in the Ithaca community, the problem with Alex Atkind ’07 is the problem with Cornell. In posts on newspaper forums and in discussion threads on Craigslist, the case of the Cornell “dog torturer” has come to reveal the resentment felt by Ithaca denizens toward Cornell students. Some mention the alcoholism encouraged by the Greek system, but fundamentally, the comments are about social class, about privilege, about the way it’s granted and the way it’s taken for granted.

In a Sun column some time ago, a graduating senior prided himself on having gone through Cornell and having remained a “conservative” — one of the few on a campus that pushes the “liberal agenda.” Reflecting on his experience in the community, he lamented that while racial, ethnic and sexual diversity are plentiful at Cornell, the campus is unfortunately bereft of “ideological diversity.”

While this paean to diversity invokes all the positive associations of the term, “ideological diversity” is at heart deeply anti-intellectual.

It has been a year since Gannett began charging $25 for standard HIV antibody testing, a policy which continues despite resolutions by both the Student Assembly and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, as well as the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation that all Americans should be routinely tested for HIV. Of course not all services can be free at Gannett, but HIV testing is free at the vast majority of university health departments — including many of Cornell’s Ivy League peers — for the following reasons: