Is IU that boring?

Have we lost our famous Hoosier touch, they'll ask?\nOf the top 20 party schools profiled this year by The Princeton Review (no relation to the university of the same name) this year, we were listed at a cushy No. 15. We managed to rank 16th for college newspapers, beaten by a number of schools I didn't even know existed, let alone that they have a college newspaper. Our highest ranking in any college category in The Review was fifth place -- a dubiously weak honor for "Lots of Beer."\nIU has slipped, we're told, and the news is we slipped hard. In 2002 our college was identified as party central in the incredibly unscientific survey, coming from nowhere and jetting all the way to No. 1. \n"Oh, how the mighty have fallen," they'll cry!\nOr, have we fallen at all? Looking around our campus, particularly this week with new students arriving and veteran students returning, it hardly seems like it was just a scant two years ago that we were crowned the No. 1 party school in the nation in The Review's rankings. \nMostly because not much has changed, including the fact that The Review is as flawed now as it was when we were the king of the party schools.\nIt's silly to think any university can be summed up and translated into a simplistic rating. University settings rarely provide things that can be easily quantified; and those that can -- tuition, class size, student-teacher ratios, classes taught by associate instructors -- provide merely a sliver of the actual college experience. \nWith the ever-increasing collection of college rankings and guidebooks, there is stiff competition to sell the most books, not necessarily the pipe dream of being the most accurate. You could read 100 versions of life at IU and none of them would be fully right or wrong. \nIf you were to take The Review at its word, you'd think we don't have any favorable attributes, since we missed positive categories like "Great College Library," "Great College Town," "Beautiful Campus" and "Happy Students" -- although the reality seems to be contrary to that.\nSince we also didn't appear in any particularly negative categories, such as "Dorms like Dungeons," "Long Lines and Red Tape," "Professors Make Themselves Scarce" and "Alternative Lifestyles not an Alternative," you might be left with some incorrect views of us, although we have our unfortunate fair share of dirty dorms, bureaucratic headaches, unavailable professors and homophobia. \nIt's a glib interpretation, but maybe we're somewhere in between. If we're not the best, that certainly doesn't mean we're the worst. Or vice versa. A little informal surveying among the student population won't provide you with an accurate gauge on the college experience since all experiences will be different. \nAs far as I can tell, since I opened my freshman dorm room two years ago, IU isn't the thing that changed, rather, I have. I couldn't summarize IU when I got here; I can't do it at this (hopefully) half-way point; and I probably won't be able to do it when I'm ready to leave. \nAs cliché as it sounds, there's something to be said for making your college experience what you will and enjoying it as you go along. The Princeton Review provides one view of IU, but not the final view of IU.\nPeople love to put things in categories and quantify everything so that it makes sense. But show me someone who can sum up the complete college experience in a few hundred words and I'll show you someone who has been doing a little too much of what The Review says IU, out of everything we actually do, does best -- namely, lots of beer.