Return of the British Gift for Understatement

One of the tiresome things about the ranking season is the mania for inflated adjectives that readers of THE and other publications and sites have had to endure: rigorous, innovative, transparent, robust, sophisticated and so.

It was a relief to read a column by Jonathon Adams in today's THE which uses words like "small" and "good". Here is an example.

Disciplinary diversity is an important factor, as is international diversity. How would you show the emerging excellence of a really good university in a less well known country such as Indonesia? This is where we would be most controversial, and most at risk, in using the logic of field-normalisation to add a small weighting in favour of relatively good institutions in countries with small research communities. Some may feel that we got that one only partially right.

I think the bit about "using the logic of field-normalisation to add a small weighting in favour of relatively good institutions in countries with small research communities" refers to the disconcerting presentation of Alexandria University as the 4th best in the world for research impact.