ann arbor is overrated.

News of the recent alleged anti-Asian incident on campus has now reached Berkeley, and students are urging their peers to e-mail Mary Sue Coleman or sign an online petition, in a call for action that describes A2 as “a cleaner Berkeley.”

Not everyone is quite on board. “You realize that we’re at Berkeley, right? Asking for protest statements from students 2000 miles away seems a bit disengenuous [sic]. Obviously, this was a disturbing event and the people responsible should be appropriately punished, chastised, and ostracized… but, uh, what’s this have to do with us?” one perplexed Cal student asks. Imagine if we Ann Arborites were shortsighted enough to dwell on these kind of minor geographical details — the country would be embroiled in a disastrous war with Iraq for lack of a council resolution to stop it.

Student stabbed in the Old Fourth Ward. Isn’t this the kind of thing that the Daily’s news blog is for?

The News tries to explain why student film societies at Michigan were first forced to show Monty Python and porn to stay afloat, then phased out entirely. But most of the explanations don’t seem to hold up — the rise of the VCR and Monday Night Football, for instance. When we were an undergrad (post-VCR, in fact) there was a thriving student film organization, as there are at most of the campuses we’re familiar with.

We’d blame a general culture of malaise on this campus instead. Sure, it has a reputation for having lots of cultural events, but most of those are art and music-related, and of course Michigan has excellent art and music departments. But journalism? There’s no journalism school here, and we have about one or two student publications that publish on a frequent and regular basis; starting a special-interest magazine (pace Matt Mulder’s attempt at a Maxim clone for Michigan students) or competing newspaper just because it’s fun and exciting doesn’t seem to appeal to undergrads here. (Wisconsin, on the other hand, has two daily papers that compete fiercely.) The same probably goes for film screenings.

County Clerk and Register of Deeds Larry Kestenbaum gets banned from the Ann Arbor News online forum for no apparent reason (the post where he explains that he was banned was removed, along with all responding comments.) The moderator(s) of the forum are mysterious, unnamed presences online, but it seems fair to ask in what capacity they work for the News, and whether their decisions reflect News editorial policy.

Ann Arbor is the second most renter-friendly city in the country, according to the site apartmentratings.com. But if you click through and read the fine print, you’ll notice that the rating is based on satisfaction and affordability as reported by tenants to the site — and every one of their reports is for a large apartment building or complex. In A2, apartment complexes tend to be far from the center of town and cheaper than other apartments (not to mention reasonably well-managed compared to rental houses.) In cities like Boston, which ranked near the bottom, the opposite is often true.

Furthermore, the people in the cheapest housing in Ann Arbor tend to be students, who are probably disproportionately likely to have ready Internet access and post to a site like apartmentratings.com, further dragging down the site’s estimate of A2 rental prices. And even though the rental price data is based on tenants’ reports, a city’s affordablity score is computed by comparing it to federal income data, which bears little or no relation to the incomes of the self-selected sample they’re using to estimate prices.

So we’ve got jaw-droppingly flawed methodology, total misunderstanding of the subject material — and one more list that puts A2 near the top. Just another day in the city-ranking industry.

“Annarborisoverrated.com continues to ride its snarky one-trick pony to hilarity,” writes the Daily’s Zack Denfeld. We’ll take that as a compliment of sorts…

Finally, a new Nordlinger Watch. Preservationist NIMBY liberals aren’t the only ones who get upset when the U tears down an old building and want to get rid of parking; National Review’s Jay Nordlinger goes to the mat for his friend William Paton, after whose father the Paton Accounting Center is named. The building is slated for demolition to make room for new business school construction, but Paton, Jr. proposes tearing down the parking structure next door instead. Unlike those of the Frieze Building’s stalwarts, his arguments don’t appear to have anything to do with the historic architecture or aesthetic value of the building; perhaps the university could compromise by renaming the garage the “Paton Parking Center”?

Another student rental house fire, this time critically injuring a tenant. The News reports that one of the students needed to be alerted of the blaze via cell phone because the smoke detectors didn’t go off on time.

Also, the Daily’s Ann Arbor is Underrated column debuts, in what’s possibly the closest thing to a mention that we’ve received in that publication.

Everything seemed a lot less crowded at the University of Chicago last summer than what we’re used to here. It never seemed to be difficult to find a good table at one of the libraries, and the silence was always conducive to work (wearing corduroys in the physical science library is frowned upon.) Whereas even in August, it was tough to find a quiet place to sit at UGLi. But it seemed possible that this perception was due to what you may have possibly picked up on as a negative attitude about everything A2.

After some back-of-the-envelope calculations, though, it appears that our impression has some basis in fact. An MIT study attempts to make a case for increased library space at that school, comparing the amount of space available to that of other universities and finding the good old Institute lacking. Chicago is indeed close to the top of the list, with 75 library square feet per student. MIT is at the bottom with about 23 (although at least its compact urban campus ensures that all of its libraries are within a few blocks of each other.) Of course, most of the universities compared in the study are medium-size private schools. It’s difficult to get statistics on a lot of places, but Berkeley, with 32,814 students, has 625,103 of what they call “assignable square feet” of library space; using their estimate of 0.79 assignable square feet per gross square foot, that’s about 24 library square feet per student.

So where does Michigan fit in? The U of M libraries page claims 582,981 square feet of library, if you count the remote Buhr Shelving Facility, which works out to…14.8 square feet per student. We’d write more, but we keep elbowing people.

The News finally profiles some students they approve of: a group of housemates who love their Old Fourth Ward rental so much that they’re positively thrilled to do their landlord’s work by completing various major construction projects on it. We hope they’re getting some kind of discount on the rent.

“Finding a local landlord was important; they’d all heard horror stories from other students about renting from management companies,” the News says. Having once lived about two houses away from them in a house owned by a local landlord, our experience was a little different, but maybe things would have turned out better if only we’d had some carpentry skills, and some machine repair skills, and some plumbing skills.