Academia has an ambivalent relationship with rankings. On the one hand, academics constantly complain about them; on the other, they always look for ways to “fix” them. A similar observation could be made about scholars researching higher education. I argue that this ambivalence contributes to the further entrenchment of rankings as a practice in higher education and I call for a heightened appreciation of reflexivity in the research on the subject.
Commentary
English (higher) education: a system that divides students and disconnects them from social reality
One of the most surprising aspects of the English educational system—speaking as a non-English who does research on higher education (HE)—is how imbalanced it is for almost every student involved. Let me explain what I mean by this.
Why I have a problem with the “top” discourse
It’s usually once a day that I browse through Twitter or other social media sites and see the word “top” connected to academia somehow. Most of the time, this word drives me completely mad. I stopped to think for a moment why that is.
Why is higher education SO bad?
I often wonder how commonly held the myth of a certain kind of higher education is—of tweed-jacketed dons in lifelong jobs, with iron-plated pensions, spending lots of time with happy, engaged students, teaching with passion, with space for slow, thoughtful scholarship.
Why should we care about academic freedom? Meet Central European University, a higher education institution that relocated to another country
Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice decided that the Hungarian government breached the WTO and EU law on academia and the freedom to […]
The great university covid regression?
“Pre-covid” life in the UK almost feels like an aeon ago, but we’re only six weeks into it. At the end of February I was in London, co-hosting an event with colleagues, and was still recruiting and interviewing participants for my research project in mid-March. How things have changed. […]
UK University Strike: Pensions, Pay and Precarity
Colleagues outside UK may have noticed, on social media or elsewhere, that a significant number of UK staff, both academic and administrative, have been on strike for the past couple of weeks. Those not so familiar with recent […]
Satire, Resignation and Anger around Higher Education Rankings and Wankings
For a while now, university rankings have been intensely debated all over the world. Despite the prevailing sentiment among academics that rankings are harming the academic profession, the actual resistance […]
Protected by their shields? Why are UK universities increasingly adopting coats of arms as their logos?
In what is now a classic paper, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983) explained that companies/firms in any given field (loosely speaking, an industry) often resemble each other after a time. They described how the process […]