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“Elsewhere” is a more beautiful word than “Tomorrow”
Paul Morand
To my mother Geneviève and my aunt Evelyne
To my son Cédric
Series Editor
Jean-Charles Pomerol
Universities and Civilizations
Worldwide Academic Competition and Geopolitics
Franck Leprévost
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2020
The rights of Franck Leprévost to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942264
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-668-5
Foreword
When they published the first edition of the Shanghai International University Ranking in 2003, the three researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University who are responsible for this initiative probably didn’t imagine that they were writing a new page in the world history of higher education. Firstly, they created emulators, since several commercial companies (Times Higher Education – THE, US News and World Report, Quacquarelli Symonds – QS) and government agencies (Russia, Taiwan) had copied them by launching their own international ranking. Secondly, they have had a profound influence on the behavior of many players who were directly or indirectly linked to the world of higher education: students looking for the most prestigious universities to continue their studies, business leaders anxious to recruit graduates from the best universities, and above all, university leaders increasingly obsessed by their institution’s position in the various international rankings. And finally, they were used to convince a growing number of heads of state to grant significant financial resources for the development of world-class universities, that would worthily represent the intellectual and scientific level of the countries in question.
Over the past decade, several authors have been working to dissect the methodology of university rankings and to expose methodological flaws. Others have studied the impact of these rankings, looking at the transformation strategies of universities seeking to move up the rankings, as well as the “excellence initiatives” adopted by countries seeking to revitalize their underperforming university systems. However, none, to date, have succeeded in doing what Professor Leprévost undertook with his fascinating book on “universities and civilizations”. Not only has he dissected the methodology of the main rankings and carefully analyzed some of the excellence initiatives, particularly the Russian one, he is also the first to reset the course for academic excellence, induced by university rankings in a more global context. Indeed, one of the most interesting contributions of this new book is the analysis of the relationship between the evolution of university policies and the political, economic and cultural context of the civilizations in which they have evolved.
The author of this very well-documented work, Professor Leprévost, former Vice-Rector of the University of Luxembourg (an institution that has had an impressive track record despite its young age), challenges the reader to examine the recent evolution of major research universities in the context of the clash of great civilizations, carefully studied by Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations. Examining university strategies from the perspective of civilizations is an original approach that allows us to place the impact of international rankings in a relevant geopolitical context, and to more easily understand
