RELEASED: December 4, 2008

DANVILLE, KY—The "Lucky 13 Contest," a lighthearted look at the Forbes magazine's America's Best Colleges ranking, has concluded with the selection of first, second and third-place winners.

The Forbes list, which placed Centre at No. 13 among all colleges and universities, raised the spirits of some and the blood pressure of others when it was released in August. Reactions ranged from "way past time," to "no way," in lively message board and blog discussions.

The Lucky 13 Contest, open to all with a Centre connection, gave one simple instruction: "Send us your take on the Forbes 13th ranking—a riddle, a one-liner, a tight paragraph, a poem, a picture—use your imagination."

Centre community members responded with more than 40 entries from around campus and around the country. They ranged from witty to silly, from sentimental to mathematical, from competitive to poetic.

Here are some examples:

Jack Smith '79 of Batesville, Ind., posed his entry in the form of a question and answer:
"Think 13 is unlucky? Five hundred and fifty-six other undergraduate institutions only wish they were that lucky."

Tammy Melloan, parent of James Melloan '12, represented the College's claim on liberal arts breadth elegantly with only six words:
"Left Brain, Right Brain, Centre Brain."

Gary Bugg, Centre's director of public safety, made his point with a terse couplet:
"Thirteen…not unlucky
In the Centre of Kentucky."

James Thaler, Jr., Esq. '83, of St. Petersburg, Fla., expressed the loyalty for which Centre alumni are famous:
"No. 13 nationally, No. 1 in our hearts."

Tom Buchanan applied a quantative structure to the purple prose of what he described as "the opening sentence of a really bad crime novel":
"It was the halfway point one dark and stormy night on the second day of the third month, as Honey "Bee" Necter, a beat writer for the local fourh estate catbox liner, took a slug from a fifth of gin, her sixth sense telling her she could find her seventh heaven while an eighth note of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony played for the tenth time in her frenetic mind, and hurtled down the median of Centre Street toward Keystone State Prison, hoping her eleventh hour appeal could save mob linchpin and owner of the Twelfth of Never Social Club, Vinny "the Gudgeon" Gobio, from the hot seat before the clock struck Friday the 13th."

Susan C. Brown, parent of David Brown '08 and Laura Brown '12, made a "reverse-field" move in her entry:
"Centre: Ranked No. 13 among all U.S. colleges and universities. Luck has nothing to do with it."

David Royalty '70, of Cold Springs, Ky., took a mathematical approach with the following algebraic equation:
"U¹³ = ∞"
The solution to which, of course, is: "You increased by the Power of Thirteen equals Limitless Possibilities."

Derek Bryant '11 went mathematical even more succinctly with this submission:
"Thirteen is prime."

And now as we move into the Winners Circle (drum roll, please) in which each entrant receives 13 fabulous prizes, the Third Place Award goes to Jeffrey Huff '84 of Ashland, Ky. A number of entrants made use of the word, "triskaidekaphobia," which as all members of the Communications Office know (after having looked it up), means a fear of the number 13. Jeffrey played off this term in his one-word winning entry:
"Triskadeca-forbes-ulous"

Next, claiming the Second Place Award is Thomas Richards '11. Thomas combined play on the famous C6 H0 formula with an observation on the changing geography of academic prestige with the following winning submission:
"C13 H3 – Closing the gap between the Bluegrass and the Ivy League."

And now to announce our No. 1 Grand Prize Winner (whose 13 fabulous prizes will include an iPod Nano).

Lucky Number 13!

We know that brevity is the soul of wit, but in this case wit gave way to the sheer force of this winning entry by Jill Hoskins Fritz '86, parent of David Fritz '11 and spouse of Greg Fritz '86 of Mason, Ohio. With energy and resolve that suggests a combination of Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy and Rocky Balboa, Jill swept aside the competition to claim first place with this magnum opus:

C1E2N3T4R5E6  C7O8L9L10E11G12E13
Lucky Number 13! A Happy number in its Prime! Lucky enough for the Archimedean Solids! Lucky enough to be traditionally associated with transformation, renewal, and regeneration. Lucky enough for teenagers!
Lucky enough for the history of our country! For the Original Colonies! For the stars on our Original Flag! For the stripes on our flag still today! For the Great Seal of the United States with 13 olives leaves with 13 olives, 13 arrows and a constellation of 13 stars that together form a triangle over our eagle with the number 13 on each point. For the 13 steps on the pyramid! For the 13 bars on the shield. For the 13 letters in E PLURIBUS UNUM and ANNUIT COEPTIS! Lucky enough for 13 letters and digits in both 1776 (4) and its Roman Numeral MDCCLXXVI (9).
Lucky enough for the letters in: Don't Tread on Me, An Appeal to God, The Spirit of 76, July the Fourth, American Eagle, and American Dream! Lucky enough for our 13th Amendment, especially relevant to the coming year!
Lucky enough for our Centre College with 13 letters in its name! For 13 of our campus buildings registered in the National Register of Historic Buildings! For the education of 13 U.S. Senators! Lucky enough for the ranking of 13th in Forbes. Lucky enough for the coming year when Centre opens its doors to the Class of 2013!
Celebrate our Lucky 13!

Lucky enough for...but enough. Though the laurels have been bestowed, and we know those who will be receiving the 39 fabulous prizes, we can't quite close our report on the Lucky 13 Contest without recounting the details of one entry which came to the Communications Office in a most mysterious way.

The Mysterious Entry
Submitted anonymously and thus not eligible for competition, the poem below was discovered at midnight on the steps of the Breeze House by a Communications staffer who was coming in late to do some research on John Todd Stuart. Attached to the verses was a note in handwriting resembling that of Abraham Lincoln (which has subsequently disappeared) explaining that the poem was found in an amber-colored bottle that had washed up on the shores of Lake Herrington. Along with the rhyme was an instruction to deliver the poem to Breeze House and a brief apology to James Agee, Robert Service and Dr. Seuss.

Public Safety has not been able to determine who left the poem and note on the steps of the Breeze, but did surmise from muddy tracks leading to and from the steps that the individual was a tall man wearing unusually large boots.

The poem reads as follows:

Let us now praise famous schools
Let us sing the praises of famous schools,
At the sound of whose names, the public drools.
They’re the best of the best, the crème de la crème.
It’s hard to imagine being better than them.

There’s Vandy and Emory and MIT,
Chicago, Lafayette, Washington & Lee,
U.C. Berkeley and William and Mary,
Sewanee, Sarah Lawrence, and Middlebury.
Don’t forget Duke, Bowdoin, or Barnard,
Stanford, Haverford, or Harvey Mudd.
And the surly sages would surely frown
If we omitted Kenyon, Carleton, or Brown.
Not to mention Davidson, Wash U., or U. Penn,
Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Georgetown, or Furman.
And those in the know know it wouldn’t be nice
If we left out Macalester, Brandeis, or Rice,
Scripts or Richmond, Texas A & M,
Smith or Dartmouth or Notre Dame,
Pomona, Virginia, Cornell, or Grinnell,
UNC, Johns Hopkins, Bard, or Bucknell.

We could go on, but it wouldn’t be fair
To refrain from naming the thing that they share.
Great institutions all, each one a winner—
What they have in common? All chasing Centre!

Thanks to all who participated in The Lucky 13 Contest. Winners should contact long@centre.edu to claim their prizes.

For the Forbes article on Centre, click here.

For an op-ed by President John Roush on college rankings, click here.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

For news archives go to http://www.centre.edu/web/news/newsarchive.html.