Ranking Engagement
This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has a Point of View article by Rebecca F. Goldin, criticizing The Washington Monthly College Rankings in the September 2006 issue of the magazine. Goldin, an associate professor of mathematical sciences at George Mason University, raises some useful points, but her critique has a couple of unfortunate flaws.
A minor but annoying point: Goldin distorts the The Washington Monthly (WM) article when she frequently (five times in her commentary) asserts that the WM ratings are based largely on the "patriotic" contributions of colleges and universities. In fact, the word is used only once in the WM article, with a slightly ironic tone: 'Adults can see how "patriotic" their alma maters are.' (Quotes in original.) There may at one time have been a teaser, "How patriotic is your college?", on the WM web site, but it's not there now.
In fact, the expressed rationale behind the WM rankings is considerably more nuanced:
"...when colleges are doing what they should, they benefit all of us. They undertake vital research that drives our economy. They help Americans who are poor to become Americans who will prosper. And they shape the thoughts and ethics of the young Americans who will soon be leading the country. It's worth knowing, then, which individual colleges and universities fit the bill. And so, to put The Washington Monthly College Rankings together, we started with a different assumption about what constitutes the "best" schools. We asked ourselves: What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country."
More fundamentally, Goldin seeems to defend the ivory tower view of the purposes of higher education while impugning the motivations of WM. She writes
"Furthermore, the magazine's rhetoric veils a frightening (but popular) point of view. No longer are academic excellence, the advancement of human knowledge, and the preservation and proliferation of ideas sufficient reasons for a university to exist — or sufficient demonstration of benefit to the country. By claiming to measure patriotism, The Washington Monthly garners an immediate base of popular support, useful in the world of demand-driven journalism."
Some of Goldin's criticisms are solid: The use of metrics that privilege larger institutions, the confusing mix of absolute numbers and percentages, the use of enrollment in ROTC as a good measure of contribution, the assumption that scence and engineering are more beneficial to the country than other areas of study, etc.
The most interesting point for discussion, in my mind, is the assumption that "academic excellence, the advancement of human knowledge, and the preservation and proliferation of ideas [are] sufficient reasons for a university to exist — or sufficient demonstration of benefit to the country." Well, yes and no. I would contend that they are necessary but not always sufficient. It will often, if not always, be the case that teaching and scholarship are better, and contribute more, if they are practiced with an explicit recognition of their importance for society and with an eye to educating students for engaged citizenship.