May 13 – 17 I will be at a roundtable talking about rankings and higher education at the Peter Wall Centre, University of British Columbia. If you’re in Vancouver join us for one of the public events!

My approach to rankings is a critical one flowing from my theoretical perspective of irrational (or instrumental) rationality. In brief, we humans have a tendency to develop tools such as metrics to help us then become slaves to the tools. The old metrics (e.g. relying on high impact factor journals) are a barrier to productive change in scholarly communication; but will the new metrics be any better? What are your thoughts on university rankings? Comments are welcome.

Update December 2019: please see this book chapter preprint https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39088 for my latest work on this topic, and watch for publication of this book by the University of Toronto Press anticipated in 2020.