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I strongly disagree. (Cornell is #12, not unlisted, in that ranking, by the way.) Cornell has done extensive hiring since the last NRC rankings. Since the new ones as well, for that matter. Sturt Manning is an already famous but rising star in the field, and Caitlin Barrett and Chris Monroe are establishing names for themselves as well. Michael Weiss, who had only just finished his PhD during the last NRC ranking, is one of THE biggest names in IE studies. On the Near Eastern side of things, you have a few more promising hires and the purchasing of a huge collection of cuneiform tablets that leaves it outstripped only by Yale, Penn, and (maybe) the OI at Chicago. Like Brown, Cornell is one of very few universities that is actively expanding its ancient studies departments…I think it’s a very promising place to be.</p>
<p>At least you didn’t cite the new NRC rankings. They are even more skewed than the old ones, at least according to how I view programs. Poor Cornell especially got the shaft, as it was caught after its senior professors retired but before it hired its new batch. </p>
<p>One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that Penn students can cross-register at Bryn Mawr. While this is probably not of much interest to most undergraduates, it is a huge perk for a classicist - Bryn Mawr has an old and famous classics program that easily holds its own against those at the most prestigious universities. With Penn, it’s one of the more formidable classics duos, along with Duke-UNC and Columbia-NYU-CUNY. (Although Stanford and Berkeley have superb classics programs, as do the Boston colleges to a lesser extent, they are not nearly so closely interconnected.)</p>