ok so the times higher's big back-slapping party is in full swing, so as i'm on strike i have a bit of headspace to do a little googling into THE, and their university ranking system which is in partnership with elsevier - the big publisher

and there is this amazing snippet from m'hamed el aisati (vp of product management for elsevier - working with THE) where he says the below few things, which need a little unpicking

so straight away we are through the looking glass, as these rankings are

'not designed to say that one university is better than another'

oh right, so they are rankings, but they... do not... rank? or they rank, but not in a 'this is better' way, but 'this is different' way?

but then there is chat about universities needing to know their 'position' and 'progress' - well, that last one seems a bit like a value judgement to me 'progress' eh?

and a 'basket of diverse metrics' which are used to understand 'strengths' - and presumably, therefore weaknesses. and presumably, more strengths will rank a university above one without such strengths... but of course it's not saying one university's 'better', just, strengthier?

and trevor barratt, md of THE, says 'how can we work together to help universities improve their performance and benefit the world at large?'

so is this a ranking or not?

now of course this is all facetious on my part because *of course they are saying one university is better than another*

the interesting question seems to be - why pretend? why have a ranking system, and then say that it isn't about who is the best? who is that for?

it isn't the senior leadership teams, clearly.

is it the university workers in knowledge exchange, research, teaching, development? do they believe it?

i doubt it.

so what is it? is it a weird echo of collegiality? a sort of verbal fig-leaf to hide behind when called out about the destructive effects of inter-university competition through metrics? is it some faint, semi-acknowledgement that metrics are actually not a great fit for HE?

interesting in any case - i might dig some more and see if this odd language crops up anywhere else in discussions of rankings - that don't rank... /END (for now)