Gumption Ranking of American Universities

After downloading the file containing email addresses of Blue Security members who have been marked by spammers for 'special treatment', I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the data. After all, this is a rare accounting of public spirited individuals with the initiative to actually try to do something about spam.

It strikes me that a simple way to derive a 'Gumption Index' for different institutions, is to simply count the number of people affiliated with them on this list. So, as an aid to young scholars, considering which school will best prepare them to approach life with vigour and creativity, I present:

The Gumption Index of American Universities

MIT - 23
UCLA - 22
Harvard - 16
Stanford - 16
Duke - 13
U Penn - 13
Cornell - 13
Johns Hopkins - 10
UCSD - 10
NYU - 8
Washington U - 8
Tufts - 6
Yale - 6
U Chicago - 5
Columbia - 5
Northwestern - 5
Dartmouth - 4
Drexel - 4
Rice - 4
Brown - 3
Princeton - 3
Caltech - 2
Brandeis - 1

The clear winner however is Berkeley. With a remarkable 32495 entries (representing about half the email addresses in the file), its clear that someone at the university decided to register pretty much the entire university with Blue Security. I think this calls for an adjustment to their Gumption Index - clearly there is 1 person at Berkeley with a really enormous amount of Gumption.

Berkeley is of course also famous for its hostility to Israel. Somehow it's a rather delicious irony that they should now be the major collateral target of a massive spam war directed against an Israeli company.