A University of Alberta response to ‘A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational-ethical dilemma)’

Editors’ note: today’s guest entry has been kindly developed by Indira V. Samarasekera, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Alberta, Canada. Professor Samarasekera’s engaging entry is the eighth response to Nigel Thrift’s ‘A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational, ethical dilemma)‘, which was originally posted on 8 April 2010. The previous seven were provided [...]

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Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5

Note: the image above is a Worldle word cloud of the Executive Summary of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, a report released today by the US’ National Academies Press. See this NatureNews story (‘“Gathering Storm” back on the radar‘) for one perspective the report development process and (alarmist) message, as [...]

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Two reflections on world university rankings

Editors’ note: if you are exploring GlobalHigherEd today please be aware that we’ve just loaded up two entries below regarding the world university rankings issue.  These entries are designed to be complementary, though they clearly operate at different levels. Our sincere thanks to Pablo Achard of the University of Geneva for his very thoughtful guest [...]

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Governing world university rankers: an agenda for much needed reform

Is it now time to ensure that world university rankers are overseen, if not governed, so as to achieve better quality assessments of the differential contributions of universities in the global higher education and research landscape? In this brief entry we make a case that something needs to be done about the system in which [...]

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Rankings: a case of blurry pictures of the academic landscape?

Editors’ note: this guest entry has been kindly contributed by Pablo Achard (University of Geneva).  After a PhD in particle physics at CERN and the University of Geneva (Switzerland), Pablo Achard (pictured to the right) moved to the universities of Marseilles (France) then Antwerp (Belgium) and Brandeis (MA) to pursue research in computational neurosciences. He [...]

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Graphic feed: visualization of national origins of THE World University Ranking top 100 (2010)

Source: many eyes, 16 September 2010

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The 2010 THE World University Rankings, powered by Thomson Reuters

The new 2010 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings issue has just been released and we will see, no doubt, plenty of discussions and debate about the outcome. Like them or not, rankings are here to stay and the battle is now on to shape their methodologies, their frequency, the level of detail they [...]

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A case for free, open and timely access to world university rankings data

Well, the 2010 QS World University Rankings® were released last week and the results are continuing to generate considerable attention in the world’s media (link here for a pre-programmed Google news search of coverage). For a range of reasons, news that QS placed Cambridge in the No. 1 spot, above Harvard, spurred on much of [...]

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The OECD & Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an important part of the ‘learning machinery’ that both sheds light on and guides higher education reform. While this international organization does not have jurisdictional authority over higher education regulations and practices within nation states, it does has a unique capacity to conduct research, generate debates, [...]

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