New crop whines from universities that boycotted Maclean's

Now that's rich! The president of Carleton University, one of the original 11 which refused to provide up-to-date data to Maclean's magazines' university issue, now criticizes the magazine for using year-old data. About half of Canada's universities effectively boycotted the rankings and used various strategems to thwart Maclean's's freedom-of-information requests for current data.

David Atkinson, whose university has always placed fairly low in the Maclean's rankings, found his institution 32nd in the best overall, highest quality and most innovative category, using last year's data.

"I think if the Macleans survey had any kind of academic integrity to begin with, it has lost it. To use out-of-date data is quite inexcusable and quite frankly demonstrates to me that their only interest is in selling magazines and they have absolutely no interest in any kind of appropriate measurement of higher education in Canada," he told the Ottawa Sun.

Across town, the University of Ottawa, another boycotter, said much the same thing: no fair for not using data we wouldn't give you.

"It's very difficult to take the Maclean's rankings seriously this year, especially because almost half of the universities surveyed did not participate," said David Mitchell, vice-president of university relations.

Tony Keller, Maclean's managing editor of special projects, defended the rankings saying in the Sun story that the issue (the 16th annual) contains the best publicly available information that exists for each of 24 indicators. In this, he was being somewhat ingenuous since half the data had to be cobbled together as the previously well-oiled machinery of the universities issue was derailed and attempts to force the universities' hands, failed.