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	9.6.02 Misery in Missouri? Since 1995, the researchers at the Princeton Review have provided parents and prospective students with a wealth of statistical information intended to enliven the drab walls of America?s colleges and universities and thus aid the onerous selection process.  We learn, for instance, that Clemson University is tops in the ?reefer madness? category, while Brigham Young University languishes as the most ?stone-cold sober? school in the country.  Washington and Lee University, which boasts the most conservative student body of the 345 schools surveyed, is the top pick among young Reaganites, none of whom would dare to tread the hallowed halls of Smith College of Northampton, MA, which is home to a ?buzzing lesbian social scene.?  Theater connoisseur?  Have a look at Emerson College.  Sports enthusiast?  Maybe a visit to the University of Michigan may be in order.  Miserable?  Try any Missouri school at all. In the nine years since its publication, Missouri institutions have fetched the top spot in the category ?Least Happy Students? five times.  Stephens College twice.  The University of Missouri-Columbia twice.  And this year, the University of Missouri-Rolla.  Granted, the survey instrument used by the Princeton Review is painfully unscientific: Basically, the researchers set up a booth at each of the targeted campuses and wait for volunteer participants for whom the curiosity is too much to overcome or the boredom with everything else is incentive enough.  Kind of like an Internet survey with a slight bit of control over the survey population.  Still, it seems more than coincidental that Missouri schools would consistently rank so high in the category.  Statistically, the probability of something like that happening at random is in the neighborhood of 4,887,597,965,625 to 1. The apparently miserable state of Missouri?s students hasn?t been missed on Chris Suellentrop of Slate, either.  In examining the sorry state of affairs, Suellentrop offers a brief overview of the research findings and goes on to propose three reasons to explain the phenomenon.  To say that his explanations are a little far-fetched would overstate the interpretive acumen of the writer.  A fairer assessment would be to call them dumb. Take the second reason trotted out by Suellentrop: that the miserable state of the state of Missouri has been evident since the days of Manifest Destiny, when the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails began to slither west from Kansas City and St. Joseph.  Yep.  Hundred-year-old trails as evidence of modern-day travails.  Might as well mention the Trail of Tears, too, since it runs through the southern half of the state. Equally dubious is the contention that a Missouri?s centrist stance during the Civil War continues to have consequences for the happiness of today's students.  Again, what exactly does an officially ambivalent approach to Civil War politics have to do with the psychological or emotional state of its current population?  Suellentrop seems to suggest that this depressingly compromising attitude has lasted until now ? a pattern of osmosis informed by our great-great-ancestors, if you will.  Okay.  And we have Mark Twain to thank for our inherited gift for irony and subtle sarcasm. As for Suellentrop?s final explanation ? that Missourians are just more honest about their unhappiness than, say, the elitiar of the East or the wackos of the West ? well, I guess it does pet the ego a bit.  I'm just not sure it's entirely true. So what explains the findings by the Review?  Truth be told, I don?t really know any more than Suellentrop.  Public funding for education is pretty low in Missouri, but I don't know whether it's that much lower than it is in other states.  The weather can be kind of shitty, too, but it certainly mustn't weigh on the psyche like it must in Seattle or Portland.   All things being equal, or at least in relative balance with other factors, you'd think there would be a more even misery-distribution across the country. Maybe we?re too close to the cauldron to see beyond the haze. Maybe we?re too wretched to understand anything else than our own misery. Or maybe we just want to horde the good thing that we've got going here and don't want to let the secret out.  So we take time out of our busy lives to fill out dumb-assed surveys.
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