Times Higher Education

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The Business Side of World University Rankings

Over the last two years I’ve made the point numerous times here that world university rankings have become normalized on an annual cycle, and function as data acquisition mechanisms to drill deep into universities but in a way that encourages (seduces?) universities to provide the data for free. In reality, the data is provided at a cost given that the staff time allocated to produce the data needs to be paid for, and allocating staff time this way generates opportunity costs.

See below for the latest indicator of the business side of world university rankings. Interestingly today’s press release from Thomson Reuters (reprinted in full) makes no mention of world university rankings, nor Times Higher Education, the media outlet owned by TSL Education, which was itself acquired by Charterhouse Capital Partners in 2007. Recall that it was that Times Higher Education began working with Thomson Reuters in 2010.

The Institutional Profiles™ that are being marketed here derive data from “a combination of citation metrics from Web of KnowledgeSM, biographical information provided by institutions, and reputational data collected by Thomson Reuters Academic Reputation Survey,” all of which (apart form the citation metrics) come to the firm via the ‘Times Higher Education World University Rankings (powered by Thomson Reuters).’

Of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with providing services (for a charge) to enhance the management of universities, but would most universities (and their funding agencies) agree, from the start, to the establishment of a relationship where all data is provided for free to a centralized private authority headquartered in the US and UK, and then have this data both managed and monetized by the private authority? I’m not so sure.

This is arguably another case of universities thinking for themselves and not looking at the bigger picture. We have a nearly complete absence of collective action on this kind of developmental dynamic; one worthy of greater attention, debate, and oversight if not formal governance.

Kris Olds

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12 Apr 2012

Thomson Reuters Improves Measurement of Universities’ Performance with New Data on Faculty Size, Reputation, Funding and Citation Measures

Comprehensive data now available in Institutional Profiles for universities such as Princeton, McGill, Nanyang Technological, University of Hong Kong and others

Philadelphia, PA, April 12, 2012 – The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced the availability of 138 percent more performance indicators and nearly 20 percent more university data within Institutional Profiles™, the company’s online resource covering more than 500 of the world’s leading academic research institutions. This new data enables administrators and policy makers to reliably measure their institution’s performance and make international comparisons.

Using a combination of citation metrics from Web of KnowledgeSM, biographical information provided by institutions, and reputational data collected by Thomson Reuters Academic Reputation Survey, Institutional Profiles provides details on faculty size, student body, reputation, funding, and publication and citation data.

Two new performance indicators were also added to Institutional Profiles: International Diversity and Teaching Performance. These measure the global composition of staff and students, international co-authorship, and education input/output metrics, such as the ratio of students enrolled to degrees awarded in the same area. The indicators now cover 100 different areas, ensuring faculty and administrators have the most complete institutional data possible.

All of the data included in the tool has been vetted and normalized for accuracy. The latest update also includes several enhancements to existing performance indicators, such as Normalized Citation Impact. This allows for equally weighted comparisons between subject groups that have varying levels of citations.

“Institutional Profiles continues to provide answers to the questions that keep administrators up at night: ‘Beyond citation impact or mission statement, which institutions are the best collaboration partners for us to pursue? How can I understand the indicators and data that inform global rankings?’,” said Keith MacGregor, executive vice president at Thomson Reuters. “With this update, the tool provides the resources to reliably measure and compare academic and research performance in new and more complete ways, empowering strategic decision-making based on each institution’s unique needs.”

Institutional Profiles, a module within the InCites™ platform, is part of the research analytics suite of solutions provided by Thomson Reuters that supports strategic decision making and the evaluation and management of research. In addition to InCites, this suite of solutions includes consulting services, custom studies and reports, and Research in View™.

For more information, go to:
http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/institutionalprofiles/

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs approximately 60,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to http://www.thomsonreuters.com.

Contacts

Alyssa Velekei
Public Relations Specialist
Tel: +1 215 823 1894

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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 freely provide to ranked universities and the public, their oversight (and perhaps governance?), their conceptualization, and so on.

Leaving aside the ranking outcome (the top 30, from a screen grab of the top 200, is pasted in below), it worth noting that this new rankings scheme has been produced with the analytic insights, power, and savvy, of Thomson Reuters, a company with 2009 revenue of US $12.9 billion and “over 55,000 employees in more than 100 countries”.

As discussed on GlobalHigherEd before:

Thomson Reuters is a private global information services firm, and a highly respected one at that.  Apart from ‘deep pockets’, they have knowledgeable staff, and a not insignificant number of them. For example, on 14 September Phil Baty, of Times Higher Education sent out this fact via their Twitter feed:

2 days to #THEWUR. Fact: Thomson Reuters involved more than 100 staff members in its global profiles project, which fuels the rankings

The incorporation of Thomson Reuters into the rankings games by Times Higher Education was a strategically smart move for this media company for it arguably (a) enhances their capacity (in principle) to improve ranking methodology and implementation, and (b) improves the respect the ranking exercise is likely to get in many quarters. Thomson Reuters is, thus, an analytical-cum-legitimacy vehicle of sorts.

What does this mean regarding the 2010 THE World University Rankings outcome?  Well, regardless of your views on the uses and abuses of rankings, this Thomson Reuters-backed outcome will generate more versus less attention from the media, ministries of education, and universities themselves.  And if the outcome generates any surprises, it will make it a harder job for some university leaders to provide an explanation as to why their universities have fallen down the rankings ladder.  In other words, the data will be perceived to be more reliable, and the methodology more rigorously framed and implemented, even if methodological problems continue to exist.

Yet, this is a new partnership, and a new methodology, and it should therefore be counted as YEAR 1 of the THE World University Rankings.

As the logo above makes it very clear, this is a powered (up) outcome, with power at play on more levels than one: welcome to a new ‘roll-out’ phase in the construction of what could be deemed a global ‘audit culture’.

Kris Olds

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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 this media coverage (see, for example, these stories in Time, the Christian Science Monitor, and Al Jazeera). As Al Jazeera put it: “Did the Earth’s axis shift? Almost: Cambridge has nudged Harvard out of the number one spot on one major ranking system.”

Interest in the Cambridge over Harvard outcome led QS (which stands for QS Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd) to release this story (‘2010 QS World University Rankings® – Cambridge strikes back’). Do note, however, that Harvard scored 99.18/100 while QS gave Cambridge 100/100 (hence the 1/2 placing). For non-rankings watchers, Harvard had been pegged as No 1 for the previous five years in rankings that QS published in association with Times Higher Education.

As the QS story notes, the economic crisis in the US, as well as the reduction of other US universities with respect to their share of “international faculty,” was the main cause of Harvard’s slide:

In the US, cost-cutting reductions in academic staff hire are reflected among many of the leading universities in this year’s rankings. Yale also dropped 19 places for international faculty, Chicago dropped 8, Caltech dropped 20, and UPenn dropped 53 places in this measure. However, despite these issues the US retains its dominance at the top of the table, with 20 of the top 50 and 31 of the top 100 universities in the overall table.

Facts like these aside, what we would like to highlight is that all of this information gathering and dissemination — both the back-end (pre-ranking) provision of the data, and the front end (post-ranking) acquisition of the data — focuses the majority of costs on the universities and the majority of benefits on the rankers.

The first cost to universities is the provision of the data. As one of us noted in a recent entry (‘Bibliometrics, global rankings, and transparency‘):

Data demands are becoming very resource consuming for universities. For example, the QS template currently being dealt with by universities around the world shows 14 main categories with sub-categories for each: all together there are 60 data fields, of which 10 are critical to the QS ranking exercise, to be launched in October 2010. Path dependency dynamics clearly exist for once the pipelines are laid the complexity of data requests can be gradually ramped up.

Keep it mind that the data is provided for free, though in the end it is a cost primarily borne by the taxpayer (for most universities are public). It is the taxpayer that pays the majority of the administrators’ salaries to enable them to compile the data and submit it to the rankers.

A second, though indirect and obscured cost, relates to the use of rankings data by credit rating agencies like Moody’s or Standards and Poors in their ratings of the credit-worthiness of universities. We’ve reported on this in earlier blog entries (e.g., ‘‘Passing judgment’: the role of credit rating agencies in the global governance of UK universities‘). Given that cost of borrowing for universities is determined by their credit-worthiness, and rankings are used in this process, we can conclude that any increase in the cost of borrowing is actually also an increase in the cost of the university to the taxpayer.

Third, rankings can alter the views of people (students, faculty, investors) making decisions about mobility or resource allocation, and these decisions inevitably generate direct financial consequences for institutions and host city-regions. Given this it seems only fair that universities and city-region development agencies should be able to freely use the base rankings data for self-reflection and strategic planning, if they so choose to.

A fourth cost is subsequent access to the data. The rankings are released via a strategically planned media blitz, as are hints at causes for shifts in the placement of universities, but access to the base data — the data our administrative colleagues in universities in Canada, the US, the UK, Sweden, etc., supplied to the rankers — is not fully enabled.  Rather, this freely provided data is used as the basis for:

the development of ancillary services and benchmarking capabilities that can be sold back to universities, funding councils, foundations, regional organizations (e.g., the European Commission which is intensely involved in benchmarking and now bankrolling a European ranking scheme), and the like.

Consider, for example, this Thomson Reuters statement on their Global Institutional Profiles Project website:

The first use of the data generated in the Global Institutional Profiles Project was to inform the Times Higher Education World University Ranking. However, there are many other services that will rely on the Profiles Project data. For example the data can be used to inform customized analytical reporting or customized data sets for a specific customer’s needs.

Thomson Reuters is developing a platform designed for easy access and interpretation of this valuable data set. The platform will combine different sets of key indicators, with peer benchmarking and visualization tools to allow users to quickly identify the key strengths of institutions across a wide variety of aspects and subjects.

Now, as QS’s Ben Sowter put it:

Despite the inevitable efforts that will be required to respond to a wide variety of enquiries from academics, journalists and institutions over the coming days there is always a deep sense of satisfaction when our results emerge. The tension visibly lifts from the team as we move into a new phase of our work – that of explaining how and why it works as opposed to actually conducting the work.

This year has been the most intense yet, we have grown the team and introduced a new system, introduced new translations of surveys, spent more time poring over the detail in the Scopus data we receive, sent out the most thorough fact files yet to universities in advance of the release – we have driven engagement to a new level – evaluating, speaking to and visiting more universities than ever.

The point we would like to make is that the process of taking “engagement to a new level” — a process coordinated and enabled by QS Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd and Times Higher Education/Thomson Reuters — is solely dependent upon universities being willing to provide data to these firms for free.

Given all of these costs, access to all of the base data beyond the simple rankings available on websites like the THE World University Rankings 2010 (due out on 16 September), or QS World University Rankings Results 2010, should be freely accessible to all.

Detailed information should also be provided about which unit, within each university, provided the rankers with the data. This would enable faculty, students and staff within ranked institutions to engage in dialogue about ranking outcomes, methodologies, and so on, should they choose to. This would also prevent confusing mix-ups such as what occurred at the University of Waterloo (UW) this week when:

UW representative Martin van Nierop said he hadn’t heard that QS had contacted the university, even though QS’s website says universities are invited to submit names of employers and professors at other universities to provide opinions. Data analysts at UW are checking the rankings to see where the information came from.

And access to this data should be provided on a timely basis, as in exactly when the rankings are released to the media and the general public.

In closing, we are making a case for free, open and timely access to all world university rankings data from January 2011, ideally on a voluntary basis. Alternative mechanisms, including intergovernmental agreements in the context of the next Global Bologna Policy Forum (in 2012), could also facilitate such an outcome.

If we have learned anything to date about the open access debate, and ‘climategate’, greater transparency helps everyone — the rankers (who will get more informed and timely feedback about their adopted methodologies), universities (faculty, students & staff), scholars and students interested in the nature of ranking methodologies, government ministries and departments, and the taxpayers who support universities (and hence the rankers).

Inspiration for this case comes from many people, as well as the open access agenda that is partly driven on the principle that taxpayer funded research generates research outcomes that society should have free and open access to, and in a timely fashion.  Surely this open access principle applies just as well to university rankings data!

Another reason society deserves to have free, open and timely access to the data is that a change in practices will shed light on how the organizations ranking universities implement their methodologies; methodologies that are ever changing (and hence more open to error).

Finer-grained access to the data would enable us to check out exactly why, for example, Harvard deserved a 99.18/100 while Cambridge was allocated a 100/100. As professors who mark student papers, outcomes this close lead us to cross-check the data, lest we subtly favour one student over another for X, Y or Z reasons. And cross-checking is even more important given that ranking is a highly mediatized phenomenon, as is clearly evident this week betwixt and between releases of the hyper-competitive QS vs THE world university rankings.

Free, open and timely access to the world university rankings data is arguably a win-win-win scenario, though it will admittedly rebalance the current focus of the majority of the costs on the universities, and the majority of the benefits on the rankers. Yet it is in the interest of the world’s universities, and the taxpayers who support these universities, for this to happen.

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

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Are we witnessing the denationalization of the higher education media?

The denationalization of higher education – the process whereby developmental logics, frames, and practices, are increasingly associated with what is happening at a larger (beyond the nation) scale continues apace. As alluded to in my last two substantive entries:

this process is being shaped by new actors, new networks, new rationalities, new technologies, and new temporal rhythms. Needless to say, this development process is also generating a myriad of impacts and outcomes, some welcome, and some not.

While the denationalization process is a phenomenon that is of much interest to policy-making institutions (e.g., the OECD), foundations and funding councils, scholarly research networks, financial analysts, universities, and the like, I would argue that it is only now, at a relatively late stage in the game, that the higher education media is starting to take more systematic note of the contours of denationalization.

How is this happening? I will address this question by focusing in on recent changes in the English language higher education media in two key countries – the UK and the USA (though I recognize that University World News, described below, is not so simply placed).

From a quantitative and qualitative perspective, we are seeing rapid growth in the ostensibly ‘global’ coverage of the English-language higher education media from the mid-2000s on. While some outlets (e.g., the Chronicle of Higher Education) have had correspondents abroad since the 1970s, there are some noteworthy developments:

2004/2005

2007

  • University World News (UWN) launched in October. This outlet is the product of a network of journalists, many formally associated with THES, who were frustrated with the disconnect between the globalization of higher education and the narrow national focus of ‘niche’ higher education media outlets. As with IHE, UWN’s free digital-only mode enhances the ability of this outlet to reach a relatively wide range of people located throughout the world.

2009/2010

  • Chronicle of Higher Education launches a virtual Global edition (similar in style to the New York Times’ Global edition) in May. A new $2 million strategic plan leads to the ongoing hiring of more Washington DC-based editorial staff, more correspondents (to be based in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe), enhanced travel for US-based sectoral experts, and the establishment of a new weblog (WorldWise).
  • Inside Higher Ed announces it is hosting three new weblogs (GlobalHigherEd; University of Venus; The World View), all with substantial globally-themed coverage. Reporter staff time retuned, to a degree, to prioritize key global issues/processes/patterns. IHE forms collaborative relationship with Times Higher Education to cross-post selected articles on their respective web sites.
  • Times Higher Education (THE) teams up with Thomson Reuters to produce the Times Higher Education/Thomson Reuters World University Rankings (2010 on). THE continues to draw upon guest contributions from faculty about ‘global’ issues and developmental dynamics: this is partly an outcome of seeking to meet the needs and conceptual vocabulary of their faculty-dominated audience, while also controlling staff costs. The digital edition of THE International launched in July 2010.

From a temporal and technological perspective, it is clear that all of these outlets are ramping up their capacity to disseminate digital content, facilitate and/or shape debates, market themselves, and build relevant multi-scalar networks. For example, I can’t help but think about the differences between how I engaged with the THES (as it used to be called) as a Bristol-based reader in the first half of the 1990s and now. In the 1990s we would have friendly squabbles in the Geography tea room to get our hands on it so we could examine the jobs’ pages. Today, in 2010, THE staffers tweet (via @timeshighered and @THEworldunirank) dozens of times per day, and I can sit here in Madison WI and read the THE website, as well as THE International, the moment they are loaded up on the web.

While all of these higher education media outlets are seeking to enhance their global coverage, they are obviously approaching it in their own unique ways, reflective of their organizational structure and resources, the nature of their audiences, and the broader media and corporate contexts in which they are embedded.

In many ways, then, the higher education media are key players in the new global higher education landscape for they shape debates via what they cover and what they ignore. These media firms are also now able to position themselves on top of hundreds of non-traditional founts of information via Twitter sources, select weblogs (some of which they are adopting), state-supported news crawlers (e.g., Canada’s Manitoba International Education News; Netherland’s forthcoming NUFFICblog; the UK’s HE International Unit site and newsletter), cross-references to other media sources (e.g., they often profile relevant NY Times stories), and so on — a veritable BP oil well gusher of information about the changing higher education landscape. In doing so, the higher education media outlets are positioning themselves as funnels or channels of relevant (it is hoped) and timely information and knowledge.

What are we to make of the changes noted above?

In my biased view, these are positive changes on many levels for they are reflective of media outlets recognizing that the world is indeed changing, and that they have an obligation to profile and assist others in better understanding this emerging landscape. Of course these are private media firms that sell services and must make a profit in the end, but they are firms managed by people with a clear love for the complex worlds of higher education.

This said there are some silences, occlusions, and possible conflicts of interest, though not necessarily by design.

First, English is clearly the lingua franca associated with this new media landscape. This is not surprising, perhaps, given my selective focus and the structural forces at work, but it is worth pausing and reflecting about the implications of this linguistic bias. Concerns aside, there are no easy solutions to the hegemony of English in the global higher education media world. For example, while there is no European higher education media ‘voice’ (see ‘Where is Europe’s higher education media?‘), if one were to emerge could it realistically function in any other language than English given the diversity of languages used in the 47 member country systems making up the European Higher Education Area?

Second, these outlets, as well as many others I have not mentioned, are all grappling with the description versus analysis tension, and the causal forces versus outcomes focus tension. Light and breezy stories may capture initial interest, but in the end the forces shaping the outcomes need to be unpacked and deliberated about.

Third, the diversification strategies that these media outlets have considered, and selectively adopted, can generate potential conflicts of interest. I have a difficult time, for example, reading Washington Post-based stories about the for-profit higher education sector knowing that this newspaper is literally kept afloat by Kaplan, a major for-profit higher education firm. And insights and effort aside, can THE journalists and editors write about their own rankings, or other competitive ranking initiatives (e.g., see ‘’Serious defects’ apparent in ‘crude’ European rankings project’), with the necessary distance needed to be analytical versus boosterish? I’ll leave the ‘necessary distance’ question for others to reflect about, and assume that this is a question that the skilled professionals representing the Washington Post and the THE must be grappling with.

Finally, is it possible to provide The World View, be WorldWise, or do justice to the ‘global’, in a weblog or any media outlet? I doubt it, for we are all situated observers of the unfolding of the global higher education landscape. There is no satellite platform that is possible to stand upon, and we are all (journalists, bloggers, pundits, academics, etc.) grappling with how to make sense of the denationalizing systems we know best, not to mention the emerging systems of regional and global governance that are being constructed.

All that can be done, perhaps, is to enhance analytical capabilities, encourage the emergence of new voices, and go for it while being open and transparent about biases and agendas, blind spots and limitations.

Kris Olds

Note: my sincere thanks to the editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Times Higher Education, and University World News, for passing on their many insights via telephone and email correspondence.  And thanks to my colleagues Yi-Fu Tuan and Mary Churchill for their indirectly inspirational comments about World views this past week. Needless to say, the views expressed above are mine alone.

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Welcome to our new readers

It is perhaps appropriate, following our two most recent entries, to welcome our new Inside Higher Ed readers to GlobalHigherEd – both the Inside Higher Ed site (est. June 2010), and the WordPress.com base site (est. September 2007). We look forward to engaging with our new readers, and also using this opportunity to propel GlobalHigherEd forward for our long-standing supporters.

Apart from the weblog, it is worth noting GlobalHigherEd established a Twitter service in October 2009 (see ‘Tweeting about Phoenix’s Chicago, Chicago’s Phoenix, and other matters‘). We’ve been maintaining the service @ http://twitter.com/globalhighered with several postings throughout most days of a typical week. We’ve posted 1,155 ‘tweets’ since the service was established and have attracted approximately 850 ‘followers’ to date.

Given how well things are going on this front, we’d like to encourage our new Inside Higher Ed readers to subscribe to Twitter and start following the GlobalHigherEd Twitter service for it complements the weblog, and provides a steady stream of links to relevant articles, reports, news stories, graphics, micro-analyses, and so on that we just don’t have time to cover in longer entries.

The Twitter archive for our site, as well as several other sites on this topic, is laden with material about the globalization of higher education and research.  And, as we have noted before, Twitter is the least immersive of digital communications technologies so access to this resource is really not a challenge. You can make of Twitter what you will, and to assist you in the process we’re starting to add a series of thematic ‘lists’ that bundle different types of Twitter services. As the author William Gibson (in his Twitter service Great Dismal) puts it “Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news.” We could not agree more with this analogy for it captures the momentary aspect of the service, but also the fact that it can, if desired, be used to build up elements of a base for a more lengthy and substantial contribution.

The Twitter phenomenon, not to mention the weblog phenomenon, are now associated with a variety of higher education media outlets. This development both reflects the changing nature of the media, but also the enhanced pace of contextual change many of us are coping with, and contributing to. Our next entry will deal with these phenomena, though by highlighting their role in the rapid development of more ‘global’ coverage in the mainstream higher ed media outlets.  This said, it is clear that the traditional outlets (e.g., Chronicle of Higher Education; Times Higher Education), and as well as relatively newer digital-only outlets (e.g., Inside Higher Ed; University World News), are all adopting very different approaches when seeking to achieve this global coverage objective.

In any case, more on this topic shortly. But for now, welcome to our new Inside Higher Ed readers!

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

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The temporal rhythm of academic life in a globalizing era

The globalization of higher education and research is associated with a wide variety of shifts and changes, many of which (e.g., branch campuses) are debated about in relatively intense fashion. Other aspects of this transition, though, receive little attention, including the temporal rhythm of academic life; a rhythm being simultaneously maintained, extended, reduced, and bracketed.

In many ways not much has changed for we continue to follow a seasonal rhythm: the build up to term, the fall and spring cycles (punctuated by brief breaks of variable lengths), and then a longer summer ‘break’. When I was an undergraduate my summers were associated with work at fish canneries, mineral prospecting, and drill camps (throughout British Columbia and the Yukon) – the legacy of living amidst a resource-based staples economy.

Summers during graduate student life in Canada and the UK were focused on research, with some holiday time. And summers now, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US (pictured to the right, at dusk), are associated with a mix of research and writing time, university service, and holiday time with my family. But the real temporal anchor is the twin semester (or quarters for some) cycle split by a summer break.

Scaling up, the rhythm of institutional life follows aspects of this seasonal cycle, albeit with noteworthy national and institutional variations. For example, research administrators kick into higher gear in the US and UK (where I am a visiting professor) during the summer and winter breaks before important national funding council deadlines, yet even research active university libraries shut down for much of the summer in France for the annual holiday cycle. Human resources managers everywhere get busy when new faculty and staff arrive in the July/August and December/January windows of time. We all welcome and say goodbye to many of our students at key windows of time throughout the year, whilst the term/semester/quarter cycle shapes, in bracing ways, the rhythms of contract (sessional) lecturers.

In an overall sense, then, it is this year-to-year seasonal rhythm, with fuzzy edges, that continues to propel most of us forward.

The globalization of higher education and research, though, is also extending, reducing, and bracketing our senses of time, as well as the structural rhythmic context in which we (as faculty members, students, and staff) are embedded.

For example, research on key ‘global challenges’ – something a variety of contributors to GlobalHigherEd have been reflecting about, and something international consortia (e.g., the Worldwide Universities Network) are seeking to facilitate – is inevitably long-term in nature. This is in part because of the nature of the issues being addressed, but also because of the practicalities and complications associated with developing international collaborative research teams. This said, government funding councils are resolutely national in orientation — they have a very hard time matching up budgetary and review cycles across borders and tying them up to the agendas of large international collaborative teams (CERN and a few other exemplars aside). So while research agendas and relationships need to be long-term in nature, we have really yet to develop the infrastructure to support a longer-term temporal rhythm when it comes to international collaborative research on ‘global challenges’.

Long-term thinking is also evident in the strategic thinking being undertaken by the European Commission regarding the role of universities in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as well as the European Research Area (ERA), in the context of the Lisbon agenda. Related forms of long-term thinking are evident in a whole host of agencies in the US regarding ‘non-traditional’ security matters regarding issues like dependency upon foreign graduates (e.g., ‘the coming storm’), comparative ‘research footprints’, and the like.

Moving the other way, the reduction and/or bracketing of temporal rhythms is most obvious in the higher education media, as well as the for-profit world of higher education, or in the non-profit world once endowments are created, and bonds are sold.

On the media front, for example, higher education outlets like US-based Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the UK-based Times Higher Education, are all active on a daily basis now with website updates, Twitter feeds, and once- to twice-daily email updates. The unhurried rhythms of our pre-digital era are long gone, and the pick-up in pace might even intensify.

On the for-profit and ratings front, stock value and revenue is tracked with increased precision, quarterly and annual reports are issued, and university data from networks of acquired universities are bundled together, while fund managers track every move of for-profit education firms. Interesting side effects can emerge, including replicant or Agent Smith-like dynamics where multiple offerings of honorary degrees to Nelson Mandela emerge within one network of universities controlled by the for-profit Laureate International Universities.

Ratings agencies such as Moody’s are also developing increased capacity to assess the financial health of higher education institutions, with a recent drive, for example, to “acquire liquidity data to provide a more direct and accurate gauge of the near-term liquidity standing” of each rated institution (on this issue see ‘Moody’s Probes Colleges on Cash’, Inside Higher Ed, 16 June 2010).

Or take the case of national governments, which are beginning to develop the capacity to track, analyse and communicate about international student flow vis a vis export earnings (see recent data below from Australian Education International’s Research Snapshot, May 2010).

This bracketing of time, which takes place in the Australian case on a combined monthly/annual cycle so as to enhance strategic planning and risk assessment at institutional, state, national, and international scales, has become both more thorough and more regular.

These are but a few examples of the new rhythms of our globalizing era. Assuming you agree with me that the temporal rhythm of academic life is being simultaneously maintained, extended, reduced, and bracketed, who has the capability to adjust rhythms, for what purposes, and with what effects?

I’ll explore aspects of this reworking of temporal rhythms in a subsequent entry on the global rankings of universities; a benchmarking ‘technology’ (broadly defined) that bundles together universities around the globe into annual cycles of data requests, data provision, and highly mediatized launches.

Kris Olds

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Are we witnessing a key moment in the reworking of the global higher education & research landscape?

ACEissuebriefOver the last several weeks more questions about the changing nature of the relative position of national higher education and research systems have emerged.  These questions have often been framed around the notion that the US higher education system (assuming there is one system) might be in relative decline, that flagship UK universities (national champions?) like Oxford are unable to face challenges given the constraints facing them, and that universities from ’emerging’ regions (East and South Asia, in particular) are ‘rising’ due to the impact of continual or increasing investment in higher education and research.

Select examples of such contributions include this series in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

and these articles associated with the much debated THE-QS World University Rankings 2009:

EvidenceUKcoverThe above articles and graphics in US and UK higher education media outlets were preceded by this working paper:

a US report titled:

and one UK report titled:

There are, of course, many other calls for increased awareness, or deep and critical reflection.  For example, back in June 2009, four congressional leaders in the USA:

asked the National Academies to form a distinguished panel to assess the competitive position of the nation’s research universities. “America’s research universities are admired throughout the world, and they have contributed immeasurably to our social and economic well-being,” the Members of Congress said in a letter delivered today. “We are concerned that they are at risk.”….

The bipartisan congressional group asked that the Academies’ panel answer the following question: “What are the top ten actions that Congress, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence in research and doctoral education needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century?”

Recall that the US National Academies produced a key 2005 report (Rising Above the Gathering Storm) “which in turn was the basis for the “America COMPETES Act.” This Act created a blueprint for doubling funding for basic research, improving the teaching of math and science, and taking other steps to make the U.S. more competitive.” On this note see our 16 June 2008 entry titled ‘Surveying US dominance in science and technology for the Secretary of Defense‘.

RisingStormTaken together, these contributions are but a sample of the many expressions of concern being expressed in 2009 in the Global North (especially the US & UK) about the changing geography of the global higher education and research landscape.

These types of articles and reports shed light, but can also raise anxiety levels (as they are sometimes designed to do).  The better of them attempt to ensure that the angsts being felt in the long dominant Global North are viewed with a critical eye, and that people realize that this is not a “zero-sum game” (as Philip Altbach puts it in the Chronicle’s ‘America Falling: Longtime Dominance in Education Erodes‘). For example, the shifting terrain of global research productivity is partially a product of increasing volumes of collaboration and human mobility across borders, while key global challenges are just that – global in nature and impossible to attend to unless global teams of relatively equitable capacities are put together. Moreover, greater transnational education and research activity and experience arguably facilitates a critical disposition towards the most alarmist material, while concurrently reinforcing the point that the world is changing, albeit very unevenly, and that there are also many positive changes associated with a more dispersed higher education and research landscape.

We’ll do our best to post links to new global mappings like these as they emerge in the future.  Please ensure you let us know what is being published, be it rigorous, critical, analytical, alarmist, self-congratulatory, etc., and we’ll profile it on GlobalHigherEd.  The production of discourses on this new global higher education and research landscape is a key component of the process of change itself.  Thus we need to be concerned not just with the content of such mappings, but also the logics underlying the production of such mappings, and the institutional relations that bring such mappings into view for consumption.

Kris Olds