Something about Ipsos MORI
Anyone interested in Ipsos MORI, the company appointed to conduct a survey of academic opinion for Times Higher Education can go here or have a look at the column to the left.
It seems that they have a number of junior staff outside the UK, or at least a lot of telephone interviewers, so that does to some extent allay one of my concerns about the company.
However the biodata for the senior staff is rather disconcerting. Some snippets:
"after graduating from Oxford University"
"has worked closely with both Conservative and Labour ministers ... as well as a wide range of local authorities and NHS trusts"
"served as Finance Director of BMRB"
"started her career at the BBC"
"has been a User Fellow at the centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE and spent time working in the Prime Minister's Stategy Unit"
"a member of the MRQSA council"
"a full member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing"
"member of the council of Roehamton University"
"has chaired a number of round-table discussions with senior peers"
"has a BSc, MSc and MBA from Imperial College"
Very British (and just a little bit cosmopolitan -- "speaks five European languages", "always busy cookng up the next plan to explore to a far flung destination"), very establishment, rather politically correct and perhaps a little inward looking -- in much of the world, working with British government ministers, peers and the NHS is not something you would want to boast about.
Will a survey carried out by such a group reveal that in most respects places like Oxford, LSE and Imperial College are performing increasingly less well than leading American and Japanese universities?
1 comment:
Today, Thomson Reuters announced more details about how it will create the database that will fuel the Times Higher Education world university rankings.
The dedicated website is here: http://science.thomsonreuters.com/globalprofilesproject/
There’s a section on the peer review polling, which we’re calling the reputational survey.
With regard to this blog post – Ipsos Mori are a serious, professional outfit. The Anglo-centric backgrounds of their senior people will not make a jot of difference to this project – which is worldwide.
We are still working on the questions for the reputational survey, but as Thomson Reuters have the world’s best source of citations data, which will be used extensively in the rankings to cover research quality, we will be looking to focus the survey more on non-research elements. It allows us to get at the less tangible elements of university activity that can not be measured through numbers.
We are also almost certain to reduce the weighting given to the reputational survey compared to the old THE-QS way of doing it, so it will be less influential to the overall score for any university.
Phil Baty, Editor, Times Higher Education World University Rankings
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