An unranked program testified before Congress as often as Harvard did.

Evidence

The House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee heard from academic economists linked to the Mercatus Center about a dozen times during the financial regulatory reform debate. That is roughly the same number of testimonies by academics hailing from both Harvard’s business and law schools. According to a 2009 ranking of 31 economics programs at US universities by US News and World Report, Harvard ranked No.1. George Mason didn’t place. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Gives concrete evidence for the academic star system / attention economy argument about how the crisis interpretation was captured.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the unranked think tank out-testified Harvard’ as a case study in how crisis-legitimacy is manufactured not by academic prestige but by network positioning and message discipline.