For anyone confused like me, a definition of motley is “Having elements of great variety or incongruity; heterogeneous.”
I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.
The list includes public & private institutions across a variety of states and size ranges. It singles out particular institutions in state university systems (e.g. University of Texas at Austin but not Texas A&M or University of Texas at El Paso). Half the list is in the northeast, while the midwest and Pacific Northwest are not represented. It's 9 institutions, not 10.
I think a lot of the neural connections to the word motley come from the expression “motley crew” which has fairly negative connotations. But the truth of the matter is, this is just a very varied group of schools; some great schools on the list. I won’t say any of the schools are not great, because of course some alum will come along and say “actually we had a great department for some niche computational thing” and I’ll be embarrassed to not have known that.