The Association of University Teachers has finally discovered the benefits of local pay bargaining.. You are in a nightmare There is a clock. You, the hero, have just three seconds to save the world from a Martian-induced explosion There is just one thing - tick, tick - still to do You must answer a question. Why do universities exist? (What do you mean, you don't remember James Bond answering that.) Well, universities are about the discovery and communication of ideas that are true Uh-uh, four seconds, boom. Unfortunately, the promulgation of truth looks increasingly shaky in UK universities In assessing ourselves, we are starting to run away from it. There are two reasons: one is newspapers' desire to sell more issues, and the other is successive governments' obsession with inspections. First, take league tables.
Rankings, rankings everywhere, and yet it is still so rare to find a believable one. I have read a league table, published in a well-known education newspaper, purporting to show that Cambridge and Oxford are the world's top universities in science Caltech is apparently ninth. The University of Michigan is 41st, University College London 65th.Was this world league table itself produced scientifically, after a sifting of the facts, by unbiased observers, and a painstaking weighing of key objective data? It was not. It was produced by a UK magazine asking a statistically non-representative sample of people about their opinions.On the same day, I read about the new Nobel Prize in physics. This year, it has been awarded to a triumvirate from Harvard, Colorado and Munich. The newspaper ranking then sounded particularly implausible to me Admittedly, I know little about hard science. Therefore I went and had a look at the latest data, because I assume that, if we want to know whether the earth is flat, the best way is to take measurements rather than ask people for their intuitions.If we look at a list of the world's most highly-cited scientists, which is available on the web from a disinterested source (the so-called Web of Science), we do not find support for this newspaper ranking.
Terrific universities though they are, according to the data Oxbridge are not at the apex. Both Caltech and Michigan have far more top scientists - each with about 60 of these people, compared to 40 at either of our ancient universities Once you look at, say, Stanford, it is all over. I stopped counting when I got near to 100.What about productivity as an alternative measure of quality? Here, I found useful the 2005 Academic Ranking of World Universities. This source is produced carefully and impressively by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
