MacLean’s magazine is about to publish its third annual ranking of Canadian universities, and thereby hurt some people I care about. I am talking about the students I teach at the University College of Cape Breton (UCCB).
My university has been poorly ranked the past two years, and we can expect the same this year. Given MacLean’s criteria, UCCB’s ranking is inevitable.
We are a new university, and so do not have the financial resources and reputation that come from a long-established alumni. Our mandate is to offer traditional university degrees along with community college diplomas, and our faculty reflects this mix. We have a substantial programme for native students.
None of these facts entails that our B.A. or B.Sc. degrees are of lesser educational worth. But these facts do guarantee a place at or near the bottom of the MacLean’s rankings.
Our students understand the situation, and put on brave faces–“Kiss our arses, MacLean’s” read the headline in the student newspaper last year. But this is clearly the bravado of wounded pride.
As at any other university, our students come to UCCB with the anxious hope that their education will open up opportunities. In many cases, they know that their parents are undertaking significant sacrifices to give them these opportunities. By shaking the confidence of our students in the value of their education, MacLean’s causes harm. Is there some overriding good in the MacLean’s rankings that could justify this harm? No there is not.
I don’t deny that comparisons can be made between universities, and that some universities are better than others along some dimensions. Nor do I wish to inhibit public scrutiny of universities.
What I reject is the merit of assigning precise overall rankings on the basis of a composite quantitative evaluation.
In spite of its show of statistical sophistication, MacLean’s must exercise an inevitable arbitrariness in order to squeeze its evaluations into a form that can yield an exact ranking. In last year’s rankings, for example, MacLean’s chose to count reputation as 20 per cent of a university’s score. But why 20 percent rather than 10 percent or 15 per cent? There can be no scientifically meaningful answer to this question. And of course if the weight given reputation were different, so would be the rankings.
To take another example (and examples could be multiplied endlessly): In explaining its library criterion (worth 12 per cent of a university’s overall score), MacLean’s mentions that some universities have easy access to books at other universities through computerized catalogues. This is true of my university, for
example, where a system called Telnet allows me to get a book from any other Nova Scotia university within a matter of days.
Though aware of this consideration, MacLean’s decided against taking it into account when calculating a university’s library score. With at least as much justification, however, MacLean’s could have included this factor in its library score. And if it had, the rankings would have been different.
In a beautiful speech at Athabasca University, Northrop Frye talked of morale problems in starting a new university. He said it is important to remember that “there are no peripheries in scholarship and learning: every university is fighting on the same front line…”
This is the key fact MacLean’s cannot capture in its scoring sheets. I don’t deny that life would be easier for our students if UCCB were wealthier, or that it would be nice to have a Nobel laureate on our faculty. Nevertheless, the fundamental fact remains that the Wittgenstein I teach my philosophy students, or the calculus my Math colleagues teach their students, is the same Wittgenstein and calculus being taught at Acadia or the University of Toronto.
The books and articles we study are the great equalizers. This common property makes it possible for students at UCCB to get an education of equal value to that of students at any other university. If a university has interested students and dedicated professors, then a relatively small library or the absence of a national reputation are minor handicaps. But these considerations do not, and probably could not, enter into MacLean’s calculations.
MacLean’s rankings cater to the human penchant for status mongering, and thereby help it sell magazines. There are many ways to analyze excellence in universities without pseudo-scientific
composite rankings. I hope that in the future more universities will follow the example of Carleton (Globe and Mail, Oct.13, p.A22), and refuse to provide data to MacLean’s.
Richard Keshen is a professor of philosophy at the University College
of Cape Breton.