At Home with Phil Baty

Chair Number 4
(Photo by Ryan Riggins on Unsplash)

Early evening in the Baty household. Phil is busy rooting through the kitchen cupboards. Mrs Baty comes in. 

Mrs Baty: Phil, what are you doing? And why are all these tins of soup all over the floor?
Phil: I'm ranking.
Mrs Baty: I beg your pardon?
Phil: I'm ranking. With an R. It was complete chaos in the soup cupboard. I couldn't tell which was the most popular soup flavour. I've done a serious, robust qualitative study of all respondents (n=1), and I'm delighted to announce the winner of the inaugural Times Higher Soup Rankings. Cream of Tomato is at number 1 with 100% of the allocated soup points.

Broken Ranks

The only rank that counts (Image: Brett Jordan, CC BY 2.0)

A couple of years ago I wrote in the Funding Insight magazine about the modern obsession with league tables and how, while relatively harmless when used to bulk out a Sunday newspaper, they could be dangerously corrosive when attempting to compare universities globally.

I was heartened, then, to read a report published before Christmas by the Higher Education Policy Institute. This arrived with little fanfare, possibly because the world in general was torn between seeing the election of Donald Trump as the End of Days, and obsessively comparing and buying scented candles for their loved ones.