School Information System: On being seduced by The World University Rankings (2011-12)

October 6, 2011

On being seduced by The World University Rankings (2011-12)

The Top 400 outcomes will and should be debated, and people will be curious about the relative place of their universities in the ranked list, as well as about the welcome improvements evident in the THE/Thomson Reuters methodology. But don't be invited into distraction and only focus on some of these questions, especially those dealing with outcomes, methods, and reactions.

Rather, we also need to ask more hard questions about power, governance, and context, not to mention interests, outcomes, and potential collateral damage to the sector (when these rankings are released and then circulate into national media outlets, and ministerial desktops). There is a political economy to world university rankings, and these schemes (all of them, not just the THE World University Rankings) are laden with power and generative of substantial impacts; impacts that the rankers themselves often do not hear about, nor feel (e.g., via the reallocation of resources).

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 6, 2011 3:42 AM
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Comments

Rankings have always bothered me. Determining winners and losers have always bothered me. Rankings are almost always in fact worthless, but ultimately harmful.

They are harmful because of the damage done to both the "winners" and the "losers", and the changes to our own perceptions about what is valuable or worthwhile.

The winners develop outsized egos, a bravado carriage, an unrealistic sense of self, and often garner much undeserved resources and attention, and therefore influence. Losers are often relegated to obscurity and lesser resources.

Whenever I think of rankings and its silliness, I mull over the worthless nature of ranking some "classical" composers whose music I have enjoyed, and ask whether ranking them makes sense. (This list may not be your cup of tea, but you'll get the point).

So, here's a short list of some of these composers (by date?), and let you or others decide who is the best -- who would be ranked number one -- with the understanding that only the works of the highest ranked would be heard and the losers would be relegated to obscurity. (From 50 years collecting records, tapes, CDs, iTunes)

William Byrd, Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavali, Henry Purcell, Alessandro Scarlati, Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Telemann, Johann Bach, George Handel, Christoph Gluck, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Mozart, Ludwig Beethoven, Carl von Weber, Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Fredric Chopin Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, Charles Gounod, Jacques Offenbach, Bedlich Smetna, Anton Bruckner, Johann Strauss, Johannes Brahms, Camille Saint-Saens, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Antonin Dvorak, Edvard Grieg, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Engelbert Humperdinck, Edward Elgar, Giamcomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Paul Dukas, Alexander Glazunov, Jean Sibelius, Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Gustav Holst, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, Maurice Ravel, Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, Hector Villa-Lobos, Sergei Prokofiev, Carl Orff, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arvo Part, John Williams, Danny Elfman, Philip Feeney, Aaron Kernis.

Anyone can make a list, and even rank order it by some criteria. It could be an enjoyable task, but one which should not be taken seriously.

Posted by: Larry Winkler at October 6, 2011 1:29 PM