Perhaps your judgment's clouded if you're really palling around with Tobias Wolfe, Robert Olen Butler, Derek Walcott, various other BU harassers, or, I dunno, Julie Orringer. I deal in facts. And I didn't name any criminals; I said I thought I'd heard of harassment in connection with BU. And I was right. Umass76 and piratelizzy provided the name.

If a school's rankings are affected by nepotism (or in the case of Florida, one stellar writer chosen four times for BNAV), it deserves a mention.

Fact: Orringer was awarded the Stegner when she was either engaged or married to Ryan Harty, a current Stegner fellow.

Fact: Butler's students win a disproportionate amount of Stegners. Look at the list of winners and where they went to school. A lot of people have said this is because Butler is pals with Wolfe, and Wolfe usually throws him a bone. Teachers like to see their students get ahead. Because who knows, someday the Atlantic may rank you in the top ten.

Fact: Wolfe chose Shimon Tanaka for BNAV, then gave him the Stegner.

Fact: Wolfe chose Adam Johnson for BNAV, then gave him the Stegner.

A few Stegners that were Butler's students: Adam Johnson, Rita Mae Reese, Russell Franklin... There are others. Do I know them all? No. Because I'm not interested enough to spend hours on Google.

Heck, have you even read This Boy's Life? The back cover mentions Wolfe's "stunning act of reinvention". Do you know what that was? Falsifying documents to get into a good school over more qualified applicants.

I first read of this Stegner stuff on Kealey's blog (no, I'm not going to dig around for the link). Kealey didn't correct or remove the comments, as was his habit with false or negative information.

I'm weally sowy if these things have hurt your weetle feewings. However, they do effect my estimation of a school's integrity. They do effect where I'll choose to apply. And I will discuss it even if your mom's daddy's cousin shared a hot dog with Robert Olen Butler.

Here's a link with more people chiming in on the whole Stegner issue:

http://foetry.com/forum/index.php?topic=817.0

Here's a list of recent Stegner winners going back to 2000. Unfortunately, Orringer, Harty, or Johnson are no longer on that list. Perhaps you could Google them if you're really that interested...

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/cw/currfellows.html

Pardon me, but I'm the one who called Adam Johnson a "stellar" writer. I agree he's prizeworthy. I like his book. But let's look at the facts: he had something akin to a prior relationship with Wolfe when he won the Stegner. Wolfe had just awarded him another prize. This happened with at least one other writer. Where's the circumstantial? Where's the hearsay? Or are we just throwing around legal terms now? Subpoena! Subpoena! Force majeur!

What's that? They gave the prize to a fellow's wife? Hearsay! Can you prove they're married?

This is ridiculous. Go back and look at what I wrote. I said the number of Best Americans was a factor in FSU's ranking. Then I said that's a little misleading, as one guy appeared four times.

I have a feeling you're not really concerned about Derek Walcott's good name. You keep asking for easily verified facts but won't say which ones are false, circumstantial, or force majeur!. Just PM me with the name of your buddy and I'll apologize for mentioning him.

Fact: Wolfe chose Shimon Tanaka for BNAV, then gave him the Stegner.

Fact: Wolfe chose Adam Johnson for BNAV, then gave him the Stegner.

mingram: first let me say I agree with you totally on the last post. That is one argument I don't understand. Foetry.com really undermined itself by making the same type of argument every second. I remember them claiming it was scandalous that a journal picked a poet to publish a collection of poems by who had previously been published in the journal. Huh? Why is it surprising that they liked his book of poems and also like some individual poems?

As for counting or not counting in the rankings, putting all this aside I will say that everytime I see a ranking that is based (in part) on publication the ranker almost always picks one book to look at. This strikes me as a really bad policy. One book series is, well, only one book series. On top of that, everyone knows that individual anthologies tend to lean towards specific aesthetics. Of course it isn't surprising that a lot more Iowa stories get into BNAV than Brown stories when Wolfe is the judge. It would make a lot more sense, to me at least, to pick 10 anthologies and/or major journals and see who is getting published where. That would give us a much better idea.

Of course, it would also take actual work and research.

Are those other rankings in order, because they don't seem alphabetical?

I would agree with that -- the more robust the data, the better the rankings. Not to get too wonky here (I am a former D.C. trade journalist, so it's often my natural inclincation) but it seems that what's needed, more than anything, is a consensus about what data points should actually count when trying to rank these schools.

I know people have pointed out how it's hard to rank MFA programs the way law schools or med schools are ranked, but does anyone know how, say, lit PhD programs are ranked?

In Reply To

I guess this doesn't strike me as all that scandalous. Wolff liked Tanaka's work when he read it for BNAV, and then liked it again when he read it for the Stegner?

Why is that so weird?

FWIW, it strikes me that you are setting up an impossible task for Junior Maas. If we had water-tight evidence of rigged contests (or sexual harrasement for that matter) we would already have had completed lawsuits. To be honest you sound a bit like the Barry Bonds advocates I see everyday. "These are all allegations and hearsay, you have no actual proof at all!!"

Well, when Barry Bond's shoe size and helmet size radically change despite being well past puberty. Circumstantial evidence tends to be all we have in these types of cases, barring confessions.

And while I think Junior Maas picked a bad tone and sarcasm there (for this board at least, people are quick to get offended...), it seems to me you guys attacked her and goaded her on. Her reply seemed pretty fair to me. You seem to have wanted some grand jury testimony and a photobucket page of bloody gloves.

a) Iowa and Arizona (along with Columbia) are the largest programs in the country so if all things were neutral you would EXPECT them to have more stegners than anywhere else. And frankly, while I'm sure FSU is a good program, it has never been considered a program on the level of Iowa and I've never even seen it on a top 10 list before. So it is hardly like Butler is just teaching the cream of the crop (like an Iowa or UVA might be able to claim) and that is why they are winning.

But maybe Butler is just a magician amongst teachers and can turn his little MFA stones into diamonds in a way no other teacher can. Or maybe he just molds them into writers whose stories appeal to Wolfe? Who knows. But I think it is a fair question to raise, if it is indeed true he gets a significant number of students winning awards from his friend.

Give us your top 5, benny -- so we may assault you, unceasingly and without mercy!