{"id":1822,"date":"2013-03-09T22:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-09T17:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcurocks.wordpress.com\/?p=1822"},"modified":"2013-03-09T22:54:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-09T17:24:00","slug":"reputat10n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ramramaswamy.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/09\/reputat10n\/","title":{"rendered":"REPUTAT10N"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"THE\"
\nThe big news for us in the past few days is of course that we are No. 10 in the Times Higher Education World Reputation\u00a0<\/strong>Rankings of Academic Institutions in India<\/a>. Just so that it is clear as to what this means, I went to the THE website<\/a> and learned that\u00a0this ranking is from data compiled by Thomson Reuters. The ranking is based on responses from around 16,300<\/strong> leading peer-reviewed academics from across the world who were asked to nominate no more than 15<\/strong> of the best institutions in their field of expertise.<\/em><\/p>\n

39% of responses were from the Americas, 26% from Europe, 25% from Asia Pacific and 12% \u00a0from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia;\u00a0<\/em>18% of the respondents were from the physical sciences, 21.3% from engineering and technology, 22.1% from the social sciences, 15.4% from clinical subjects, 12.7% from life sciences and 10.5% from the arts and humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Untitled\"<\/a>Who were the other 9 in the top 10? IISc, five of the IITs (Bombay, Kanpur, Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur). AIIMS. Along with us, the other universities are Delhi<\/em><\/strong> and Aligarh<\/em><\/strong>. One can critique methodology, analysis and inference all one wants, but still its nice to be up there in the list, although most of the others in the top 10 are so different from the UoH, one wonders about the nature of the ranking… \u00a0Reputation<\/em> is such a tenuous (and ephemeral) thing, and as Iago realized<\/a>, so valuable.<\/p>\n

And value it, we do. What we seem to do with much less felicity, though, is to ask the right questions (as the THE<\/strong> people seem to have!) and when (or if) asked, our answers are often wanting… \u00a0I had actually started on this post a while ago, sparked by some concern on the poor flow of information on campus, almost as if we have an informal\u00a0DADT<\/strong>\u00a0(Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell!) policy on all issues. But that’s really for another post.<\/p>\n

Which finally brings me to what makes a ranking that is based on the opinion that other academics have of us. \u00a0In no specific order, this would probably have to include<\/p>\n