Academically, and loosely socioculturally, a meme (from “mimeme,” derived from “mimesis,” meaning imitation or mimicry) is any one particular thing in existence (idea, picture, phrase — you name it) that perpetuates the popularity of a certain idea and often transforms through its repeated simulacra. One of my favorite examples is that, truthfully, Jesus is a meme. Think about it — Jesus has been replicated in so many forms throughout history in many cultures and many contexts.

The spread of memes in their current form is an incredibly cultural phenomenon. I argue that I’m interested in memes in an academic context, but I’ll admit that I’m just another one of the sheep in the herd. Ask anybody: I communicate primarily in gifs (soft g, fight me) and memes — GroupMe, Twitter (hit me up at @itsoliviapopp), Stanford’s meme page, emails. I’ll even speak in memes; I’m a purveyor of memes.

I’m not a STEM major, but I managed to create the highly rigorous MEME index, a university meme page scoring system based on the eponymous mnemonic for four different publicly accessible (or accessible with membership in the group) criteria:

• Membership (weight: 40 percent), operationally defined as meme page members per undergraduates
• Engagement (weight: 30 percent), operationally defined as the average number of posts per day based on the last 30 days
• Moderation (weight: 10 percent), operationally defined as three minus the absolute value of the z-score of members per moderator for meme pages in the sample being scored
• Expansion (weigh: 20 percent), operationally defined as the average number of members added per day (based on the last 30 days) divided by the average number of members added per day (based on total members averaged over the page’s entire existence)

I then used a weighted product model, which allows you to makes the units of each criterion different (sorry, I don’t do enough actual statistics to really know how to do anything else!), to create a MEME index score for each university meme page to determine which meme pages are the strongest. There’s plenty of ways to gauge the strength of a meme page, so I wanted to consider page activity, popularity, current growth and how the administration of each page stacks up against that of other pages. Due to the nature of the index, the scores are constantly fluctuating and are only able to be compared in relation to other pages in the sample.

For those who need a quick summary, based on the MEME index, here are the rankings for the sampled 18 schools, from highest score to lowest score:

1. UC Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. UChicago
4. Columbia
5. Penn
6. Yale
7. Brown
8. Georgetown
9. Johns Hopkins
10. Cornell
11. UCLA
12. Duke
13. Northwestern
14. Princeton
15. USC
16. MIT
17. Harvard
18. Dartmouth

(And to all those questioning why Stanford is second, I can safely say that I created the metrics before I gathered all of the statistics, so no, I didn’t work backwards from a list.)

I was able to join all but Stanford’s and UC Berkeley’s meme pages — which I was already a member of — rather quickly, over the span of a day and a half, which was fun. Take the validity of the MEME index as you may (or maybe it’ll become a socially perpetuated meme of its own!), but at least take the stats to heart. Now enjoy these carefully curated meme highlights.

Fun facts

• Thirteen out of 18 of the sampled meme pages included at least one “Naruto Run” event in the meme page’s calendar (sorry Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard and Penn)
• Three out of 18 of the sampled meme pages (Columbia, Cornell and Johns Hopkins) were closed groups, indicating that content is only viewable to members of the page

Selected events (alphabetical by university):

• Construct a glass box to contain Hurricane Irma (Duke)
• Everyone in Boston blow Southeast at the same time (Harvard)
• Yell “I am Moana!” at the Lakefill (Northwestern)
• Publicly denounce La Croix on top of Hoover Tower (Stanford)
• Tide Pod Buffet Dinner (UC Berkeley)
• Ask “is mayonnaise an instrument” in Stulberg’s Symphony Orchestra (UCLA)
• Yell “I’m Dirty Dan” in UChicago’s Quad (UChicago)
• Spin clockwise on Locust to cancel out the wind (Penn)
• Reenact the Walmart yodel kid on Old Campus (Yale)

Contact Olivia Popp at oliviapopp ‘at’ stanford.edu.