Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines recently published a list of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, yet not one person on the list is a member of the Penn faculty.
The list was populated by people who have "shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it," according to Foreign Policy spokesman Jeff Marn.
Candidates also had to be currently alive and active in public life.
The list boasts such famous names as authors Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia and Chinua Achebe, columnist Paul Krugman, Pope Benedict XVI, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
Included are people from universities like Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale -- and representatives of 33 different countries.
However, the fact that no one from Penn made the list does not seem to bother any University officials.
"They must have bad taste," President Amy Gutmann said.
University spokeswoman Lori Doyle also shared Gutmann's sentiments.
"We don't even make a big deal out of the [U.S. News & World Report] rankings," Doyle said, "We are delighted when we are ranked well, but if not we don't really even pay attention."
Doyle added that the criteria for these types of rankings systems change easily and are very subjective.
"Who knows what kind of criteria they use [to pick their nominees]?" Doyle said.
Defending the subjectivity of the list in a column accompanying the article, Prospect magazine writer David Herman said that the list is a reflection of modern society.
"If this list had been drawn up by the women's pages of the Guardian, there would have been many more women. ... Le Monde would have included more French thinkers and so on," Herman wrote.
"This list is, in part, a reflection of the preoccupations of the Anglo-American centre at a particular moment," Herman added.
Marn said that the initial list of nominees contained close to 400 people and was compiled through nominations from editorial contributors from the two magazines as well as from worldwide experts in a variety of disciplines.
That list was not released.
"The top 100 was then chosen by both FP and Prospect staffs from this initial list of nominees," Marn said.
The final list, which was published last week, has been posted on both magazines' Web sites, where people can vote for their own top five intellectuals.
In addition, the magazines have allowed people to write in nominees they feel are deserving of nomination.
The results will be posted in November.
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