Well, the news is out. Former Microsoft CEO and current Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer just donated enough money to the Harvard computer science department to fund twelve professorships. Twelve! To put that in perspective, that’s 50% more than the total number of computer science professors at Williams College, and about half of the current size of Harvard’s CS faculty.

While it’s no doubt thrilling to see the attention that computer science is getting nowadays, I couldn’t help but notice this little segment from The Crimson:

“Right now I think everybody would agree that MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon are the top places [for computer science],” Ballmer said, adding that some would also include the University of California at Berkeley. “I want Harvard on that list.”

Wait a second, did Ballmer just exclude Berkeley from the Stanford, CMU, and MIT group? Last I checked, they were all clustered together at rank one … perhaps the exclusion is related to how Berkeley’s a public university? I can’t really think of any other reason. And while he did mention the school, don’t you think that if he viewed the top schools as a group of four, he would have said “I think everyone would agree that MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley are the top places […]” instead?

Anyway, I hope Berkeley can maintain its reputation for the next few years. This is mainly so that people will be willing to take me seriously at a first glance/conversation when discussing research; beyond that, of course, they’ll care more about your actual record than the school you go to. But it helps to go to a highly-ranked school. And I’m sure that some of Harvard’s new faculty members will have gotten their Ph.D.s from Berkeley. Incidentally, the fourth and fifth year students at Berkeley who have strong publication records must be feeling ecstatic.