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Date: | Tue Jun 26 12:54:45 2007 |
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It is an unfortunate fact of life, now, that any railing about journal
rankings and their use by administrators comes a decade too late. Most
European governments now use those rankings to award funds to
universities and departments. Department chairs then must tell faculty
that to get funds, they must cooperate in producing legitimate research
as certified by the certifiers. I just had the experience of speaking
with an historian from the university of Oslo who, when asked why he had
published his paper on X in economics journal Y rather than history
journal Z, said that his department gets no credit for research
publications unless the journal is on the "official government list" of
serious journals. This is a fact of life I know now in the UK (with the
RAE), France, Italy, The Netherlands, Greece, etc. Curious indeed that
the US, the home of "assessment" and "accountability", has no such
national nonsense. But beware the US regional accrediting agencies in
the future, if state legislatures don't get there first in a response to
tuition inflation and ever-increasing university budgets to finance
"excellence".
E. Roy Weintraub
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