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How TAC came to be ranked sixth of the lot, I am intrigued to know. But there are some TAC grads that I can’t wait to tell . . .

I was surprised that for conservatism, both Steubenville and U of Dallas were ranked ahead of TAC and Christendom. It might have to do with the size of the graduate school program. TAC, of course, takes a purest "Great Books" approach. Christendom was founded by a historian, so we have history majors. (One of the jokes we had going around was that a TAC grad can tell you all about what Martin Luther said, but not when he said it. Aristotle had considered history the lowest of the academic disciplines. There was less of it when he wrote.)

Steubenville has a nasty infection of charismatics (Ave Maria suffers a similar influence) that TAC is immune from. U of D is uneven, though you can get a good education there if you want to. My best childhood friend lost the Faith there, even as he won the St. Thomas Aquinas award for being the top philosophy student in the class of '86. I don't know if that was the school's doing or not, but I always held it a bit against it.

Christendom takes zero fed money, and is near D.C., allowing many political internships for those who want to go that route. I wouldn't consider TAC at the time, as they would have zeroed out all those expensive U of Chicago transfer credits. Plus, CA was a bit too far from my home in Connecticut.

I had a professor in seminary who did his undergrad at U D in the 70’s, and have a colleague who did his grad work there beginning in the 90’s. Uneven is a good word. And the philosophy department seems to be in about a four-decade slide.

Transferring from Chicago to Christendom would have been quite the experience—esp. in the early to mid 80’s. I salute you.

But it was Morning in America Again at the time.