In an earlier post, I wrote about the ways in which journal rankings systems can make it difficult for people in small specialized fields to meet the “key performance indicators” (KPIs) of universities that are intent on improving their rankings in the global university ranking systems (University Rankings, Publishing, and the Future of Knowledge Production and Academic Employment).
What I would like to look at here is how this can actually play out. We’ll look first at an imagined scenario, and then we will follow that with a real-life example from Singapore.
Stage 1
The process begins when a university first starts playing “the rankings game.” Administrators start looking at the numbers, and they realize that people in certain fields, particularly those in the Humanities, do not have high publication metrics.
The first reaction of our imagined university administrators is to say to their Humanities employees, “We understand that your field is different, and we are not going to penalize you for the fact that your work is cited so little, and that the journals you publish in are not highly ranked by SCImago/Scopus.”
Stage 2
Then after a few years of playing the rankings game, our imagined university administrators are feeling good because they’ve been able to get the university’s global ranking to go up. Now they’re hooked and want more.
Once again, they see those low numbers coming from the Humanities. . . Hmmm. . . this is getting to be a real problem, one that has to be fixed.
How do you fix it? You call the Humanities professors in and you say to them, “Ok, we’ve got new KPIs for you. We need you to publish in top-ranked journals.”
At this point, no one is getting laid off. However, no one from fields that cannot produce high publication metrics is getting hired. So, there is a gradual process of replacement that starts to take place.
Stage 3
Then, a few years later, our imagined university administrators are really energized because they are almost at the top of the rankings. They just have a little bit more to go.
Once again though, they see those Humanities numbers. A lot of the Humanities professors haven’t been able to meet the new KPIs. . . something has to be done.
It’s time to “restructure.” And that’s the end of the Humanities.
I do not think that every university that gets into the rankings game will go through these three stages. Only the most rankings-driven universities will implement the third stage (restructuring). Many, I predict, will stay at the second stage, and will see Humanities departments shrink, and get merged, but not completely disappear.
An important case to follow, as it may give a sense of what we might expect in the years ahead from some universities in the global rankings game, is that of Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
Established as a liberal arts college in 2011, the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced last year that it will close Yale-NUS College and merge it into an interdisciplinary honors program at NUS.
Now, just a few days ago, it has been reported in the news in Singapore that “Undergraduates who enrol at the new NUS College will likely not be required to take traditional liberal arts subjects such as literature and philosophy, which were a defining feature of its predecessor Yale-NUS College.”
I can’t read the rest of this article because I don’t subscribe to The Straits Times, but it certainly looks like the Humanities is going to take a hit in this restructuring process.
I am, of course, aware that there must be more involved here than the consideration of rankings, however, the point that I am trying to make here is that I am also certain that the rankings are playing a role in these developments.
For a university that is as focused on the global rankings as NUS, taking on board Humanities scholars with their low publication metrics will negatively affect the university’s overall numbers, and that is something that administrators will try to avoid/prevent.
This is the new normal in the world of rankings-focused universities. One could say that NUS is at the extreme forefront of these developments, and therefore, does not represent the majority, but others are keen to follow its lead.
