Waiting for U-Multirank

Phil Baty of Times Higher Education writes from a conference in Sweden:

"Peter van den Besselaar, a professor at the Rathenau Institute in the Netherlands, said that global rankings had become a "hot topic" - heavily criticised, yet also heavily used - among university managers.

He criticised the Shanghai Jiao Tong world rankings, arguing that existing systems' main weakness was their failure to address the individual missions and goals of the institutions they evaluated. This had "perverse effects", he said, as managers followed "the incentives embedded in the indicators".

Professor van den Besselaar called for a multi-dimensional ranking, with solid indicators relevant to different missions. This is being attempted by the European Commission-funded U-Multirank project, an interactive ranking where institutions are compared with those of the same type and mission via indicators chosen by users. But the project is only at the pilot phase of a feasibility study, and will rank just two subject areas by the end of 2011. "

The point about perverse incentives is a good one although I remain sceptical about those individual missions that cannot possibly be expressed by any indicator in any existing ranking.

A multi-dimesional interactive ranking sounds very nice but if we are still in the pilot stage of a feasibility study then there is not very much to get excited about.