Global Stamp Collecting

When the history of the early twenty first century comes to be written, one creative form will be seen to have dominated this fledgling millennium above all others: the creation and curation of lists. 

Future generations, clothed entirely in technical fibre and accessorising implausible eyewear, will laugh in disbelief at our obsession with comparing and ranking one thing against another. 

They'll hold up crumbling back copies of the Independent and marvel at the way it advised, straight-faced, on the '11 best pouffes', the '17 best scented candles', and the '7 best Welsh interiors'. They'll access the TripAdvisor archive to giggle at the rank of 117 restaurants in Hounslow and the top-rated visitor attraction in Lowestoft (the East Anglia Transport Museum, since you ask).

But those bright young future people will save their loudest laugh for global league tables of universities. Whilst comparing pouffes, candles and Welsh interiors is relatively harmless, and the effect of crowning the East Anglia Transport Museum the best place to go in the wider Lowestoft region is somewhat localised, global league tables deliver a double whammy of being both corrosive and pointless.

Meanwhile, in Moscow Airport...

Call me paranoid, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed the uncanny resemblance between the recent photos of Enemy of the State/Champion of the People (depending on your point of view), Edward Snowden, and the Times Higher Editor at Large/Rankings Editor (depending on your point of view), Phil Baty.

Was it just that they wanted to save costs by sharing a photo shoot? Did they both get the same PR advisor telling them to look serious, quizzical and suspicious at the camera? Did they both, for whatever reason, happen to end up in the transit area of Moscow Airport at the same time? Or are they, in fact, one and the same person?

We, the people, have a right to know. We should be told. I'm off to picket the American Embassy, on the basis that they must have had a hand in all of this.

Who's with me? Anyone..? You, at the back..?

Snowden

Baty

'Almost Everybody Can Score Well in Something'

Alex Miles alerted me to the wonderful University Ranking Watch, a blog that feverishly follows the various league tables for universities around the world. It makes fascinating but, frankly, bewildering reading. After only a few minutes you begin to realise that there is a league table for everyone, and if you're bottom of one and want to bolster your ego, you just need to find another methodology/data set/satisfaction survey.

So, if you're not making the cut in terms of teaching or research quality, you can always have a look instead at 'university sustainability', or 'productivity', or even 'student sex'. As the blog admits (about 'subject rankings'), 'the methodology and weighting varies...so that almost everybody can score well in something.'

However, he seems to have overlooked the latest league table, recently highlighted by Phil Baty: 'the UK Olympian University Ranking'. If you've been waiting for the day when you'd see St Mary's University College Twickenham in the top 10, your time has come.

'There Is No Definition of the Ideal University'

Interesting counterblast in the Guardian last week to the puffing and posing that goes with the announcement of the World University Rankings.
'Imagine a newspaper decided to create a table ranking the world's cities,' suggests Malcolm Grant of UCL. 'It would be a nonsensical exercise.' There's no such thing as an ideal university, he says, and trying to compare a university in one country with that in another is ridiculous. Even within countries, universities vary massively. For example, the research income for a science or medical university are going to be much greater than for one focused on the humanities or social sciences, but that doesn't mean that the research of one is 'better' than that of the other. Even using citations is dangerous: Grant points out the example of one of the recent sets of rankings that concluded that Egypt's Alexandria University trumped both Stanford and Harvard for their influential research measured by impact.
'Global rankings have afforded annual light entertainment, but they are now seriously overreaching themselves,' he concludes. 'They do a disservice if they influence student choice, or come to be treated as a performance measure by the leaders of hugely diverse institutions.'