Rankings as Imperialism

A conference was held in Malaysia recently, ostensibly to "challenge Western stereotypes of knowledge."

There was a comment on international university rankings by James Campbell of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

"Others warn of the threats of new colonialism practices such as rankings exercises.

“This is another form of imperialism as universities have to conform with publishing in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) journals in order to be ranked among the best in the world,” says Campbell."

There are many things wrong with rankings but this is not a valid criticism. The Shanghai rankings have shown the steady advance of Chinese and Korean and to a lesser extent Latin American and Southwest Asian universities. The QS rankings (formerly THE -QS) were notoriously biased towards Southeast  Asia with a heavy weighting being given to a survey originally based largely on the mailing lists of a Singapore based publishing company (that may no longer be the case) .

As for the the current THE - Thomson Reuters rankings, they have declared an Egyptian university to be the fourth best in the world for research impact.

The inadequacies of current rankings have been discussed here and elsewhere. But whether it is helpful to anyone to reject them altogether is very debatable.

Most of the conference was devoted not to rankings per se. but to supposed critiques of western science. Readers may judge these for themselves.