Archive for June, 2005
The Times, The Times Higher Education Supplement (June 10) reports, that “UK campuses don’t rate”, i.e. that bright (and money-carrying) Singapore students don’t notice that there are other Unis in the UK apart from Ox, Bridge & ICL, because these other Unis don’t rate high on international comparisons.
Usually the British are among the most obsessed with league tables — except when this weapon turns itself against them. Whatever the argument, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking has its methodology — and its impact: Here, Andrew Oswald, correctly notices: “these world rankings will do us painful good because they focus back on a university’s core business: ideas.”
So it’s not so easy “to demonstrate the range of world-class research undertaken in UK institutions”, as Brian Ferrar, the first secretary for science at the British High Commission in Singapore, is reported saying, if they’re not able to track that world class research down.
What then will happen is what recently a UK University put into a job ad: “The kind of people who have the courage to uproot themselves are often more interested in their intellectual environment than the particular city they live in.” And while this particular University tried to attract people, the add could easily have been read the other way round — particularly since said Uni of X did its utmost to stress that “the quality of life (in X) is unusually high” …
http://www.thes.co.uk/story.aspx?story_id=2022500 and http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2022224
