What rankings don’t tell us about our universities
We live in a world that loves numbers and statistics. It reduces even a highly qualitative experiences into some sort of measurable data. My discomfort with this obsessive craze for quantification has led me to interrogate the prevalent practice of ranking our colleges and universities and reducing the experience of exploring the frontiers of knowledge to pure metrics — the statistics of publications, the quantification of citations, the collaboration with industries, or the employability of students.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course, a university should encourage its faculty members to publish research papers in good journals and it should be really concerned about the employability of young students.
However, there are many other socially meaningful and life-affirming tasks that our colleges/universities need to perform in order to pursue the objectives of libertarian education. And, ironically, the ranking agencies seldom bother to reflect on these ‘non-measurable’ functions.
In this context, let me raise three questions, which, I am afraid, experts at a ranking agency such as the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) seldom ask.
The first, an uncomfortable question: Are our universities — including the ‘top ranking’ ones — truly celebrating the spirit of academic freedom and critical enquiry?
Accept it. A meaningful answer to this question cannot be found in an attractively packaged database that a college/university presents before the ranking agency.
As I write this piece, what comes to my mind is the anguish of Rashid Khalidi — the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, USA. He feels that under the changing political circumstances, it is no longer possible to teach a course on Modern Middle East History — a course he has been teaching for many years at Columbia. The reason is that the university administration has completely surrendered before the Trump administration and accepted the official definition of ‘antisemitism’.
Indeed, as Professor Khalidi has stated with intense pain, it has become almost impossible to teach about topics, such as the history of the creation of Israel or the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the support of the US and much of western Europe. To quote Khalidi, “Columbia — once a site of free enquiry — has been turned into a gated security zone with electronic entry controls. It has become a place of fear and loathing; it is the antithesis of academic freedom.”
Think of the paradox: an Ivy League university; yet, the absence of academic freedom!
As I reflect on the fate of Columbia University, I begin to wonder whether a ranking agency like the NIRF will ever bother to know if the professors and students in Indian colleges/universities too are living with the similar kind of fear: the fear of asking the sort of questions that unsettle the status quo — say, the questions related to the cult of narcissism, hyper-nationalism and religious fundamentalism.
Who will tell the ranking agency experts that the management of citations, the performative acts in ‘international’ conferences and the narratives of ‘placements and salary packages’ does not necessarily indicate that a college/university is truly encouraging the spirit of academic freedom and critical enquiry.
My second question is related to the mental health of young students and researchers.
Look at, for instance, a ‘top-ranking’ IIT. Of course, it can easily impress the ranking agency through showcasing its splendid infrastructure, the attractive CVs of its faculty, the collaboration with leading techno-corporate houses and the placement narratives of their ‘products’. Yet, the same institution is possibly facing a harsh reality — the recurring suicides and the chronic depression and anxiety amongst otherwise bright students. This malady does not stop, even when these institutions collaborate with psychiatrists, counsellors and even spiritual gurus. Furthermore, in an extremely hierarchical and asymmetrical society like ours, it is not uncommon to find students from the deprived sections who experience diverse forms of marginalisation and humiliation.
Does a ranking agency have a scale to measure the intensity of this pain, agony and alienation? Or, for that matter, can it go deeper into the very root of this crisis?
Let the dark aspect of these much-hyped academic institutions — academically brilliant, yet psychologically wounded, students — not be concealed beneath the fancy narratives that fascinate the urban/middle class: say, this or that IIT has occupied a prestigious place in the QS World University Rankings!
And finally, do these ranking agencies ever search for a libertarian university — a university that seeks to see beyond the neoliberal doctrine of education as just a tool for economic productivity or education as the mastery of the ‘skills’ the techno-corporate world demands?
Amid the celebration of the university-industry nexus or the corporatisation of higher education, it is really important to assert that a libertarian university ought to generate a learning milieu that activates the moral conscience of the students and teachers and gives them the philosophical clarity as well as the intellectual courage to question what we are witnessing today — the glorification of war and militarism in the name of nationalism, the massive destruction of the ecosystem in the name of ‘development’, the promotion of some sort of techno-utopianism — the belief that technology has a solution to all social/human problems — marketed by a handful of billionaires.
The ranking agencies should realise that without this moral conscience and sociological imagination, even a ‘top-ranking’ university might fail to evolve as a libertarian university. It is like recalling what TS Eliot felt through his poetic wisdom:
“Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
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