Global university rankings have reshaped the landscape of higher education (HE) across various parts of the globe. The intensified competition stirred by these rankings has significantly affected academic lifestyles. The quest for global university rankings has also inevitably increased the degree of homogenisation amongst universities. Given the…

Over the past decade, universities in the People's Republic of China have notably progressed in international rankings. Most of the existing literature interested in this development describes the adoption of university rankings in China as a recent import of a global institution, and as being driven by a governmental agenda that seeks to bolster…

In this paper, I argue a new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments for governing education aims to make invisible a 'low intensity civil war' against the labouring classes. It does this through the elevation and ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures aimed at producing a new form of differentiated belonging: that of…

A great deal has been written about the rise of the world-class university and global university rankings over the past two decades. Much of this work focuses on either the efficacy of the indicators used to measure world classness or on the purposes they serve regarding student choice in an international market. However, less attention has been…

This article questions the existing understanding of how global university rankings work to coordinate higher education policy. Rankings are often analyzed as accelerators of reform processes while their differences are overlooked. We suggest studying the particular encounters between rankers and national policy contexts as occasions for friction…

The purpose of this study is to analyze how China has strived to develop its world-class research universities and what are distinguishing characteristics of China's efforts to form these universities for the last decades. This study begins with a review of literature and research questions. It then touches on the background and rationale of…

A recent report published in the United Kingdom proposed the image of "an avalanche" to describe the radical changes affecting tertiary education in many parts of the world (Barber, Donnelly and Rizvi, 2013). Indeed, powerful transformative forces of three kinds--rupture factors, crisis factors and stimulus factors--are challenging…

This essay provides an account of The Ohio State University's (OSU) rhetoric department during the tenure of Joseph Villiers Denney, arguing that he appropriated and repurposed national trends in education and rhetoric in ways that complicate the narrative of rhetoric and composition's decline in the late nineteenth century. In this essay, the…

This article discusses how the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) accountability mechanism of No Child Left Behind makes use of supposedly objective standardized test scores to describe schools in a certain way when the very same results could serve to draw very different conclusions. Examining the proficiency scores of students from a specific middle…

This article reports a study that improves the authors' understanding of the potential impact of expanded community college transfer access to elite institutions by examining a variety of key questions using two national databases with complementary strengths. By estimating the number of low-income community college students currently transferring…

This collection of 26 essays examines the historical position of Harvard University as one of the nation's most influential institutions. Included are: (1) "Introducing Harvard: A Social, Philosophical, and Political Profile" (John Trumpbour); (2) "How Harvard is Ruled: Administration and Governance at the Corporate University"…

This article describes the events surrounding the University of South Florida's (USF) involvement with Sami Al-Arian, who was a professor at USF prior to accusations of involvement in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The seeds of the Al-Arian controversy were planted in the early 1990s when USF--an ambitious but underfunded…