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Sir Malcolm Grant challenges the global pursuit of university rankings and questions whether the current definition of a “world-class” institution truly serves the needs of diverse societies. Drawing from his experience leading top-ranked universities and advising governments internationally, Grant critiques the narrow metrics used in global rankings and the pressure they place on universities to conform to a single model. He reflects on the value of comprehensive universities that foster interdisciplinary collaboration and societal impact, while cautioning against the overemphasis on league tables that often fail to capture the true effectiveness of teaching. Grant highlights the limitations of current ranking systems, including their inability to measure educational quality and their tendency to drive institutional decisions based on superficial performance indicators.
I've got the privileged position of having led a very highly ranked university and I'm very deeply skeptical about rankings. I find that what they tend to do is to uh promote a particular view of what a university is and compel everybody else to join that club. Now, I've advised - actually I've advised for seven years the federation government of Russia who were pursuing that side. I've worked with the French government who have successfully pursued that and the model which becomes the epitome for the rankings is the Anglo-American comprehensive university in which both teaching and research and impact and innovation are in the same organization. That's not the continental Europe model historically research was undertaken in separate organizations; the universities tended to be rather lighter weight teaching organizations but in France in particular that model has now changed to one much more like the AngloAmerican model. So, if you look at the top 20 universities in the world now I think you'll find at least two French universities who previously were not visible because their research was being undertaken through CNRS and NSERM and the other big research funders so that's changed. But, has anything fundamentally changed? I'm really not sure now I step away from the rankings and ask myself what is the ideal model for a university and it's going to be different in different places and for different purposes. My personal affection obviously is for the comprehensive university because I believe that students and faculty benefit from interplay with other disciplines i remember something that we did at UCL years ago we were pioneering in setting up a global health program in which we said the medical school will play only a small part in this. We would bring in the architects, the economists, we bring in the lawyers, we bring in all the disciplines around the notion of global health realizing that formal systems of health care are a very small participant, what really is important to understand the socioeconomic conditions in which people live. So, that that feeds my concept of of an efficiently socially-minded working university, whether that feeds into global league tables is is is really to my mind irrelevant. I used to say to colleagues look we're a way up the top there's only direction one direction we're likely to go and so don't don't get all boasty about league tables. However, if I look at it from the other perspective and I see governments around the world anxious to be able to show that their universities are powerful in the world. This is probably the only metric that they've got and from that perspective I think they fulfill an important function which is within those countries to highlight the sheer importance of universities as being organizations in which governments need to invest. If they are not only to rise up the league tables but also to ensure the future for the young people so my skepticism about league tables. I suppose comes from the position that one is when you're when you're in the league tables uh and understanding that they do have a function; I was I've actually been quite distressed though to see occasions in which university presidents have been fired because the university didn't go up in the league tables. Well, sorry the league tables are artifices i mean the they're functions of design of people over there who twitch the indicators from time to time and universities do go up and down and if they don't people say what's the point of the league table uh so every year. I see in the British press Cambridge has gone up one notch and Oxford's gone down two imperial's down there and UCL's are way up there and I think these are are not realistic measures of the changes in those institutions over that one-year period. it's just not not credible at all and when we see significant changes in the league tables it's more likely that an institution has absorbed another one and widened its diet of research, etc. The other limiting factor is that we do not know how to measure teaching effectiveness. We can measure research because have, we have all sorts of proxies teaching we don't and I think students are often misled to go to a university because it has a strong brand through research but may not be anywhere good as good in terms of its teaching.