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