You are right that Ohio State has finally been allowed to lift its admission standards after decades of being forced essentially to take anyone who completed high school in Ohio.
I have to take exception to at least one thing you say. There is nothing new about high standards at Ohio State. Let's take a look at psychology. We're talking about a University where Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow delivered lectures/published books in psychology. Where Frederick Taylor did the first work motivation studies and where seminal human resource theories first were promulgated. In the 1960s, the definition of marketing adopted by the American Marketing Association was The Ohio State University definition, and it was proudly proclaimed as such. America's first school of ceramic engineering was at Ohio State, it's best education faculty and one of its best journalism schools (I know how you guys love to point at yours now). The great Theodore Levitt at Harvard Business School came out of an Ohio State doctoral program and so did half of the marketing faculty at Northwestern's top rated Kellogg School.
Which business school's faculty were consulting to Bank One when they invented the ATM machine, the Visa credit card, 24-hour banking, personal banking, electronic funds transfer at point-of-sale? Who was consulting to Huntington when they invented bank by phone?
On whose campus was the bar code invented? And who brought the science of logistics into the modern era?
I could go on and on but it is unnecessary.
ORD may go over the top, he even says so, but what he is drawing your attention to and what you guys fail to admit is that there was an orchestrated programme to cut state subsidies to Ohio State and it gutted most of these programs in the late 1970s. The goal of that strategy was to build up the other Ohio universities and it was a failure.
As I said, I respect anyone who holds a degree from an accredited Ohio university. I especially tradition of public universities where kids without parental support could put themselves through and change their lives.
But, I and many others here feel as strongly as ORD about attempts to somehow argue that Ohio University and Ohio State are equivalent, that degrees from the schools hold the same cache or that somehow Ohio State is just managing to separate itself from the others recently.
To hold these views does not require arrogance. After all, I am someone who flunked out of Ohio State after two quarters and only did well when I returned from the Army. So, it should be clear that I do not feel myself superior to anyone.
However, it would be dishonest and disrespectful to myself and those who taught me, if I allowed others to dismiss the difference between other Ohio universities and Ohio State as inconsequential, when I know the personal sacrifices that so many faculty, alumni, and staff made to make sure those differences remained throughout the difficult years of insufficient funding.
