What’s up at Wits?

 

The university of Witwatersrand is in turmoil. Faculty are going on strike for higher salaries, claiming that there has been a drastic decline in quality in recent years. Evidence for this decline is the university’s fall by more than a hundred places in the QS world rankings. The administration has argued that these rankings are not valid.

THE University of the Witwatersrand is one of SA's largest and oldest academic institutions. According to its strategic planning division, at the end of last year there were about 1300 academic staff, 2000 administrative staff and nearly 30000 students, with 9000 of these being postgraduates.

There is no doubt that Wits has pockets of excellence, and many talented academics who are players on the global stage. However, this excellence is being overwhelmed and dragged down by inefficient bureaucracy in its administrative processes.

There are more administrative staff than academic staff, and as one academic said: "It is impossible to get anything done."

David Dickinson, president of the Academic Staff Association of Wits University - which has more than 700 members and is threatening to strike, said: "Between 2007 and last year, we fell more than 100 places in the QS World University Rankings.. A significant problem is that the most important part of the university has been forgotten: its employees."

The university is ranked second in the country, after the University of Cape Town, but scraped into the top 400 in the world at 399th on the QS World University rankings for last year.

The faculty are correct about the QS rankings. Between 2007 and 2011 the university fell from 283^rd place to 399^th. The decline was especially apparent in the employer review, from 191st to below 301st and international faculty, from 69th to 176th.

But there is a problem. From 2007 to 2011 Wits steadily improved on some indicators in the Shanghai rankings, from 10.9 to 11.2 for publications in Nature and Science, from 26.2 to 29.9 for publications and from 14.8 to 16.3 for faculty productivity. The score for alumni winning Nobel prizes has declined from 23.5 to 21.2 but this was because the two alumni were being compared to an increase for front runner Harvard.

So which ranking is correct? Probably they both are because they refer to two different periods. The  alumni who contributed to the Alumni indicator in ARWU graduated in 1982 and 2002. Publications and papers In Nature and Science could reflect the fruits of research projects that began up to a decade earlier.

The QS rankings (formerly the THE-QS rankings) are heavily weighted towards two surveys of debatable validity. The declining score for Wits in the employer review from 59 points (well above the mean of 50) to 11 is remarkable and almost certainly is nothing to do with the university but is the result of a flooding of the survey by supporters of other institutions leading to a massive increase in the average number of responses.

The decline in other scores such as international faculty and faculty student ration could be the result of short term policy changes. However, if it is correct that research and teaching are being strangled by bureaucracy and mistaken policies then sooner or later we should start seeing indications in the Shanghai rankings.