What are these supposed rankings? Has anyone made a formal rank of the classics programs?
Here are some interesting questions to consider: What is Harvard's program so weak? Why is Yale's program even weaker? Columbia's seems pretty bad too.
Has the process made anyone else think they might be better going off and making a fortune in business or traveling the world or writing poetry or joining an international separatist group in the jungle or becoming a Don Juan or anything anything else and that only a dweeb or a buffoon with no ambition and no notion of the sublime would submit to five years of memorizing dictionaries and reading philological commentaries in an attempt to climb the petty hierarchy of classics scholarship and academia (not to mention years as an assistant professor in whatever rural wasteland you end up in; the inevitable low salaries; the losers who will be your colleagues - I mean when, really, have you met a Classicist who really struck you as being a superior human being, a man or woman of extraordinary character and beauty and nobility and a wide-ranging intelligence - not, that is, a philological mind crammed with stuffy facts and texts memorized and decaying parchments - )? What a depressing path we are embarking upon, friends... Load the pistol now, Werther -
Has anyone noticed how all the best classicists are at Oxford? But that a PhD from Oxford gets you nowhere on the American job market? What a paradox. How about the fact that Princeton is the only place with a decent placement record? I wonder what you have to do to get into Princeton.