Policymakers in higher education, the majority of university leaders, and managers—Vice Chancellors, Deans, and Heads of Departments—are neither trained to conduct research nor qualified to teach, yet they frame policies for learning and teaching, research strategies, and norms for ranking institutions, teacher performance, and research outputs and evaluate impacts. Such bureaucratic and managerial interventions have reduced institutions of higher learning to merely marketplaces of useless regulations, compliances and certificates. It is not surprising that the entire higher education sector is directionless and functions like degree mills and qualification-selling shops offering last-chance discounts.
There are no winners in the battle to rank teaching, research, and institutions of higher learning. In this rat race of the ranking game, there is no finishing line and no winner; there is only the creation of a toxic culture of performance in the pursuit of a meaningless number in the ranking factory. That number does not reflect critical contributions to knowledge that address issues concerning the essence and emancipation of human beings and their society. The managers of higher education use ranking numbers to inflate their pay and bonuses, whereas teachers and researchers are left having to enlarge the lenses of their glasses to read and write to participate in this academic hunger game. This perverse managerial game is designed to control and destroy research and new knowledge production—a slow process that takes time to brew—but ignorant and arrogant managers replace that slow process with a culture of instant coffee, in which so-called essentialist publications in well-ranked journals are meaningless in terms of their contribution to advancing knowledge and social progress.
The business of ranking is a zero-sum game in which victory is an academic illusion that lacks even basic human excitement. The metrics and methodology used in the ranking of teaching, research, and institutions are not only flawed but also fail to understand the local institutional and individual contexts in which research and teaching take place. The league tables and the scoring of research and teaching do not represent socially meaningful education. There are more than 25 global rankings of universities, yet they have failed to produce quality in research and teaching. It is the normative nature of the sector that is difficult to measure or represent through numbers. However, reckless ranking continues as if it were a prestigious exercise, when in reality it is designed to expand the commercialisation and commodification of education, learning, and teaching.
The compliance regimes embedded in teaching and research ranking frameworks take away valuable time from knowledge production and dissemination. In such an environment, both students and teachers suffer, and the quality of both research and teaching declines. A poem, a piece of art, a photograph, a physics paper, a philosophical treatise, or economic-model-driven research each has its own importance within its own discipline and audience; measuring these outputs in terms of reductionist numbers within the empirical tradition distorts their distinct purposes.
The ranking regime is fundamentally based on a culture of compliance performance rather than performance in research and teaching. The entire ranking exercise is designed to domesticate creativity and the research culture, promoting a certain type of knowledge while silencing critical voices within research and teaching—because critical voices question power and reject its dominant narratives. The intellectual priority of the ranking regime is to create research outputs and narratives concomitant with funding agencies and regimes of power. It prioritises the objectives of the establishment rather than investigating issues that affect people and their everyday lives.
The idea of emancipatory knowledge creation and dissemination is pushed to the margins and often abandoned by universities in the name of producing quick, Mickey Mouse impact cases. The ranking exercise replaces the fundamental questions of teaching and research in higher education with ranking questions, in search of positions and numbers in an Excel sheet managed by people without any form of academic credentials. The ranking regime creates conditions that replace critical thought with simple, meaningless numbers and scores.
The objective and subjective questions of life are filtered by the ranking regime, which reshapes teaching and learning so that education becomes a commodity for sale and profit rather than a pursuit of knowledge. The question here is not about the flawed aims, objectives, ideas, data, and methodology behind the ranking regime, but about the absolutely unnecessary ranking exercise itself. This battle of ranks does not contribute to the growth of universities or institutions of higher learning. It only serves the purpose of the higher education market, where managers make profits while students and teachers lose their space and freedom to pursue knowledge and skills that fulfil both the essence and emancipatory logic of life.
Rankings do not reflect the quality of research and teaching. They accelerate university managers’ marketing strategies to grab money from students through student fees and from governments through research funding and grants. They help elite institutions capture the lion’s share of public money, whereas local institutions continue to suffer from structural funding marginalisation shaped by the ranking of teaching and research. Institutions that were established, and individuals who were trained, to pursue knowledge for the greater common good in society are now chasing the number of publications, funding applications, and a make-believe research culture and environment designed to attract funding. This rat race destroys the conditions of research and teaching.
Despite the misleading nature of rankings, managers and governments continue to support the culture of ranking. The shallow nature of ranking destroys societal trust in institutions of higher learning, because they behave like marketplaces in pursuit of ranking instead of producing the critical research necessary for knowledge dissemination. The ranking exercise destroys the cooperative conditions necessary for both research and teaching as a collective activity. Rankings deepen a toxic culture of performance and competition and replace the collaborative culture of knowledge production. The empiricist culture promoted by rankings destroys the critical culture of knowledge creation and dissemination. The biased and dubious data used in ranking undermine universities and public trust in these institutions of higher learning. Therefore, all forms of ranking exercise that ranks teaching, teachers, research, researchers, journals and publishers need to be abandoned for good.
