BEPRESS, SSRN, USNWR, and Tufte

At the AALS Workshop on the Ratings Game, I was glad to hear Erica Moeser's point about presenting the USNWR rankings in a clear graphical format, in order to highlight how little difference there is among most law schools. (If you want to see how I presented the rankings and the University of Houston's place among them one year, see it here. As best as I can tell, this version--edited because of length--is the final version that I presented, rather than an earlier draft.) The tighter the grouping band of schools, the less real difference there is among them. (I made this point at the Indiana Law Journal's symposium, The Next Generation of Law School Rankings, in my article, Eating Our Cake and Having It, Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult in Law Schools.)

There are all sorts of ways to present information. Edward Tufte makes this point over and over in his work, which itself has led to some wonderfully funny work, such as the Gettysburg Address, done in PowerPoint and the single best customer service complaint ever done in PowerPoint, Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel.

For example, I now have a BEPRESS page and a blog and an SSRN page. I added the BEPRESS page because I liked the way it presents my scholarship. I also like the SSRN page, although it presents my same information in a different way. And I like the blog because, now that I'm no longer an administrator, I'm enjoying my revived freedom of speech. Same person, three different aspects. (Not to mention my current official page at the University of Houston Law Center--or the one I'm going to get at UNLV.) If a very small person can have so many ways of presenting her information, why can't we look at the USNWR rankings in a way that shows how they distort small (and not particularly important) differences among schools?

Do we give the USNWR rankings so much power because we don't understand statistics? Or are there other reasons? Is it a problem of social pressure, a la Solomon Asch's conformity experiments? Is it because we don't want to have to change what we're doing (either for the right reason, which is to make law schools better, or for the wrong reason, which is to chase the rankings)? Is it easier to blame others for the imagined slights of being, say, 10 on an amplifier's volume scale when the amplifier itself "goes to 11"?