By Hans Plauborg
hhp@adm.au.dk
International university ranking lists are hugely popular all over the world among vice-chancellors, politicians, students and employ-ers alike. They play a central role in an era in which education has become a global product, when research is something universities do to strengthen their national competitiveness. But lists that give all kinds of different universities a specific ranking may be like beauty competitions whose judges do not share the same definition of what beauty really is – competitions in which everyone wants to be their own judge.
The first international university ranking list was Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The aim of this list was to benchmark the Shanghai university against other universities. But the publication of the first ranking list in 2003 coincided with the Chinese government’s wish to create a series of elite universities. A number of commentators have pointed out that the few quantitative parameters in the Shanghai ranking list were designed to ensure good positions for Chinese universities. And it is true that Chinese and other Asian universities are placed higher on the ARWU list than on the other leading ranking lists.
Just one year later, in 2004, the next major international ranking list was born: the Times Higher Education list, or THE list. The indicators in this list – including considerable emphasis on “reputational surveys” – were criticised for favouring the big elite universities in the UK and the USA. According to its critics, the list said more about how famous universities and their researchers were than about how good they were.
Criticism of the bias of these two lists in favour of particular universities has led to the ap- pearance of a number of “national” lists. One of the grandes écoles in France, MINES ParisTech, has developed its own ranking list, in which the French universities do exceptionally well. And the new Russian RatER ranking list puts Moscow University in a surprising fifth place worldwide – ahead of Harvard and Cambridge.
But there are more ranking lists in the pipeline. The EU Commission has asked the German analysis agency CHE, which is responsible for the leading ranking list of German universities, to develop an international ranking list. One of the reasons for this initiative is that the ARWU, THE and QS ranking lists attach too much importance to bibliometrical data and fail to focus sufficiently on the other tasks and roles of universities. According to the EU Commission, the result has been that continental universities have been unfairly treated in these lists.
No, not at all. I’ve seen a couple of ranking list results since I arrived, but this kind of thing doesn’t interest me. The only thing that influenced my choice of AU was the group of researchers I would be working with. And they had a good international reputation here, so that’s why I decided to come to Aarhus.
Yes, and even though it’s a couple of years since I arrived in Århus I can clearly remember that AU was number 55 – a fine position confirming that AU was one of the world leaders in my field.
Of course this influenced my choice.
We attach great importance to these ranking lists in my home country, so of course I checked the rankings. I did quite a bit of research and looked at a lot of ranking lists indicating that AU (and the Department of Molecular Biology in particular) had a good position and a lot of publications in internationally recognised academic journals. This was one of the main reasons why I chose AU.
