Here are some quotes from The Australian. Some of this sounds very familiar.
Support is growing across the higher education sector for an independent national university ranking system that would be more comprehensive than the Shanghai Jiao Tong survey of world universities.
Monash University vice-chancellor Ed Byrne advocated a national ranking system to enhance the sector's performance in line with national needs. Professor Byrne said too much emphasis was placed on the internationally recognised Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, which focused on research and hard sciences.
He recommended an Australian system that would also give due weight to teaching, learning and community engagement.
"It would be interesting to have for Australia an agreed national ranking system that would look at research output, educational excellence and community engagement in a way that the government and the Australian people could have confidence in," he said.
Such a ranking could provide universities with a strong guide for assessing their own performance. But, as with all rankings, Professor Byrne said, care should be taken not to over-emphasise comparative standings.
Ross Williams, author of the discontinued Melbourne Institute rankings of Australian universities, backed the idea. He suggested that a new system could take into account the different missions of universities.
Professor Williams said such a system could act as an additional check on the performance indicators the federal government was looking to introduce, such as the Excellence in Research initiative.
But he cautioned that it was important there be several different rankings that differentiated between the various missions of universities. He said attempts at an aggregated single ranking tended to be simplistic and distorting and risked causing "mission drift".
And now, for the rest of the story...
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