In a recent letter to the editor, my good friend and colleague Jon Appleton draws attention to the fact that Dartmouth did not do so well in a recent ranking exercise in The Times Higher Educational Supplement and then uses this result to condemn the academic leadership at the College ("Dean of Faculty Gets an F," The Dartmouth, November 10). Although the overall results place Dartmouth 138th out of 200 universities world wide, this should not be a cause for concern or a basis for criticism.
I've never been one to pay much attention to university sweepstakes about who is No. 1. Such ranking games usually rely on nebulous measures such as "academic reputation," or simple counts of faculty, Ph.Ds produced and so on. But like Appleton, let's take these rankings seriously for a moment.
"Peer Review" is worth 50 percent of the overall score. "Peer Review" is based on a survey of academics and their opinion of different institutions. The Times contacted 1,300 academics in 88 countries over a two-month period, but we do not know what they were asked. It is my experience that most non-American academics have at best a vague knowledge of Dartmouth College in large part, I suspect, because the label "College" triggers visions of a high school rather than a university. Take out "Peer Review" and Dartmouth jumps to No. 72 in the rankings.
The Times does not assess anything to do with the educational experience of students. The measure of international students (used in the survey) is pretty useless; it correlates perfectly with "Peer Review."
Ranking based exclusively on citations per faculty (which carried a 20 percent weight in the calculations) moves Dartmouth up to No. 46, ahead of the University of California-Davis (where both the current dean obtained her Ph.D and the former dean spent a significant portion of his professional life but left to return to Dartmouth). Oxford and Cambridge universities drop to No. 74 and No. 77 respectively. The London School of Economics drops from No. 11 to No. 184.
What does all this mean? That faculty at the London School of Economics and Oxford and Cambridge better put down their cups of tea or their sherry glasses and get busy placing their articles in journals that are counted in citation analyses? I'm not sure, but I think that these ranking games should be treated with caution.
They probably should not be the spring-board for an argument on academic leadership at Dartmouth. We did lose a great colleague when Jamshed Bharucha left for Tufts University (No. 104 overall, No. 27 in citations per faculty -- a smidgen behind Yale). Michael Gazzaniga has stepped down as dean but remains on our faculty. And he continues to exert his leadership, for it was Mike, in tandem with English professor Jonathan Crewe, who was the main force behind the recent conference on whether the liberal arts are dead -- not, as Appleton states, Carol Folt.
Folt is a talented teacher and a well-published scholar whose appointment as dean will have little to do with Dartmouth's position in whatever rankings game we choose to play other than boost it. Before becoming dean of the faculty, Folt served as dean of graduate studies. As that dean, she significantly increased the graduate stipends, secured universal health care for all graduate students, helped garner several million dollars in graduate training programs and was the key person behind several other initiatives. I am confident that these successes augur well for her term as dean of the faculty.
