The Commission Strikes Back

Jordi Curell from the European Commission's Directorate General for Education and Culture has written in defence of the proposed U-multirank university ranking system. He starts:

"Is Times Higher Education worried about competition to its world university ranking from U-Multirank? It looks like it from the tone of its reporting on the new European ranking initiative launched in Dublin at the end of January. "

He concludes:

"However, the EU should not finance U-Multirank forever; this should be limited to the start-up phase. That is why the contract for delivering the ranking includes the design of a self-sustaining business plan and organising the transition to this model.

These are challenging times for higher education in Europe, and the purpose behind U-Multirank could not be clearer. Our objective is improving the performance of Europe's higher education systems – not just selling newspapers."
 

 By the way, THE is a magazine now, not a newspaper.