For those of you not in academia, you probably will be interested, and either amused or saddened, by the following.
Each year, late in the fall, USN sends out a survey to certain members of academia, among others. Deans, associate deans, and the most recently tenured faculty member, among others, get the survey. (Though beside my point, I should point out the survey consists of bubbling in a number, 1 to 5 or "don't know," for each of the 180-odd law schools they check on. "Survey" glorifies it, in other words.)
In the weeks leading up to that, every member of academia is bombarded by junk mail, most of it in the form of extremely glossy brochures from many law schools. Some of these brochures are a couple of pages, or a card-stock post-card, while others are magazine-in length. I assume this happens at other schools as well as at Mercer, but when I get to my mail box, I stand over the trash can and deposit all of these things directly into it, without noticing word one about any of the schools. I got two envelopes recently, large ones, $1.05 postage each, which I ripped open to find the same single page letter that had nothing of interest to me, from a school I didn't notice the name of. $2.10 per member of academia; what's that commercial about bottled water: a moment in the mailbox, a lifetime in the landfill?
It seems particularly bad this year. At a time when I thought money was low and concern for the environment high, one would think law schools would be trimming back on these PR campaigns; but I guess that the power of USN rankings may explain the bombardment.
Anyhow, not a huge "ethical" issue here, but just one more costly side effect of USN.