… is a very bad response to international university rankings, as Andres Oppenheimer pointed out not long ago in the Miami Herald. He was lamenting Latin America’s decision to create its own ranking system, in response to the region’s poor showing in established global rankings. It is, he wrote, “the equivalent of withdrawing from the soccer World Cup to compete only within the neighborhood.”
And now Russia, with a similarly bad showing, is talking about doing the same thing.
Instead of spending its money to create a pretend world in which Russia gets to be a winner, that country would do better to fund anti-corruption initiatives in its universities.
March 26th, 2012 at 6:02AM
Are we going to pretend that university rankings – as they exist now – are meaningful, based only on objective data and free of misrepresentation?
Will the Russians’ self-serving propaganda be less damaging, or more believable, than the deceit perpetrated by any number of law schools in the US in the past 10 – 15 years?
Russia has got bigger problems than this. If GUW has access to ‘The Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence’ I would recommend the following article by Julie Anderson:
‘The Chekist Takeover of the Russian State’
2006, vol 19, pp 237-288.
It’s a bit dated but I can’t imagine that things have gotten better since 2006; Putin got ‘reelected’ and Khodorkovsky got sentenced to an additional 12 years.
March 26th, 2012 at 6:05AM
make that “GWU”
just a typo, no disrespect!