More University Mission Creep

Demands on western universities continue to increase and so do calls for more and more indicators in national and global rankings. Universities, it seems, are underemployed if they just provide instruction in academic, professional and technical subjects and promote research and scholarship.

Now they are supposed to support diversity and inclusiveness, build character, grit and resilience, promote anti-racism, combat sexism, homophobia, cisgender normativity and weightism, boycott Israel, reward students for overcoming adversity, engage with communities, combat terrorism, transform lives, provide gender free bathrooms, sponsor near-professional level sports teams, boycott fossil fuels, make everybody safe and comfortable except for those whose privilege needs continued confrontation.

All this is now spilling over into the rankings business. We have already seen Universitas 21, which ranks national university systems, give countries a score for the number of female students and faculty.and there have been repeated proposals  that the US News law school rankings should include faculty  and student diversity among their criteria.

US News has published a diversity index that consists simply of calculating the percentage of minority students. First place goes to Cornell, followed by the University of Hawaii - Manoa, Whitter College, California, the University of the District of Columbia and Nova Southeastern University in Florida. A quick calculation of the correlation between the diversity index and overall scores in the law school rankings shows no significant relationship between diversity so defined and overall quality as measured by the rankings.

To incorporate such an index into the law school rankings would be a pointless exercise.  If Nova Southeastern Unversity Law School, which accepts nearly half of those who apply and a third of whose graduates are not employed nine months after graduation, were to get a high ranking, this would be seriously misleading for everybody.

The US federal government is now proposing to rate colleges according to their admission of low income and first generation students, affordability, and outcomes such as graduation rates, graduate employment and entry into postgraduate programs. The problem here is that in the US and  almost everywhere else these objectives are mutually exclusive. Low income students are, on average, likely to be less academically capable, and that means, if academic standards remain unchanged, that fewer will graduate and fewer will go on to graduate study.

If the ratings plan ever happens the likeliest consequence of the colliding demands is that it will become much easier to get a degree or get into graduate school. There are dozens of ways in which academic standards can be eroded, most of which we have seen already somewhere.

Another kind of creep is the rising chorus that universities should encourage and promote civic engagement, a rather slippery concept that is difficult to describe but covers  a variety of worthy activities reaching beyond the campus such as promoting local economic development, employing women and minority groups, helping poor students succeed, buying local products and encouraging students to be volunteer teachers, . A recent conference in South Africa ended with a call for action that included a proposal that rankings should take account of such activities.

Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, even proposed to boycott rankings unless they included civic engagement as an indicator.

"Gather a group of universities and tell the rankings that you'll collectively withdraw if they don't take in civic engagement in the future. I guarantee that every one of them will listen".

But why should universities be required to do what other institutions have failed to do even though they are far better qualified. If entrepreneurs cannot promote economic growth, revolutionary parties cannot achieve social justice, trade unions cannot help the poor then just why should should universities be expected to do so?

Part of the drive for new indicators is probably rooted in the realisation that universities are losing much of their reason for existence. Research is increasingly done by specialised institutes, companies and hospitals, for- profit organisations offer no frills instruction at low prices, online learning is replacing traditional seminars and lectures. Civic engagement looks like the new quality audit, a way of keeping busy those who are reluctant to teach or research.

If all the demands for new indicators are met we will end up with hugely bloated rankings that fail to make any meaningful distinctions.