Abstract
Noting that university rankings are not new, this article reviews the effects of more than a century of higher education ranking schemes. It notes that a pursuit of high rankings has led not to “innovation” but rather to “imitation” and institutional conformity. It uses three US education thinkers—Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and Joseph Jastrow—to show how rankings drove American universities to pursue international publicity and profit rather than local service to the public good. Significantly, the result of a competition for external rankings was a loss of internal academic creativity and autonomy. The article concludes with two proposals, or thought experiments, concerning alternative rankings strategies.
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References
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Acknowledgments
This paper was presented in April 2017 at the “International Conference on University Innovation and Evaluation” held at Zhejiang University. The author would like to thank the conference organizers and forum participants for their helpful comments.
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International Academic Advisory Conference on University Innovation Evaluation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
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Nelson, A.R. Ranking university innovation: a critical history. Entrep Educ 1, 1–10 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41959-018-0002-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41959-018-0002-y