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The October 8th post has been republished in University World news NORTH KOREA Some advice on how to become a world-class university Richard Holmes 21 October 2016   Issue No:433

Rankings have become a major weapon in the struggle of universities around the world to get their fair share or what they think is their fair share of public money. The Times Higher Education (THE) world and regional rankings are especially useful in this regard. They have a well known brand name, occasionally confused with the "Times of London", and sponsor prestigious summits at which rankers, political leaders and university heads wallow together in a warm bath of mutual flattery. In addition, the THE rankings are highly volatile with significant methodological changes in 2011, 2015 and 2016. Another source of instability is the growing number of ranked universities. The scores used for calculating the various indicators in these rankings are not raw but standardised scores derived from means and standard deviations. So if there is an influx of new universities then mean scores are likely to change and consequently the processed scores of those above or below the mean. Th...

Kim Jong-un has declared that Kim Il-sung University must become a world-class institution . No doubt there will be chuckles at Oxford,  Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Iceland and the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano but it could be surprisingly easy if being world class means getting a high place in the rankings. After all, there are now quite a few places appearing in the various global and regional tables that would have been just as surprising just a few years ago. First, I should mention that there already is a ranking in which Kim Il-sung University is listed: a ranking of international influence as measured by Google's ranking of search results where the institution is 254th. Here is my plan for North Korea to become world class in just a few years. 1. Offer adjunct professorships to 150 researchers and ask them to  put the university as a secondary affiliation. Maybe they can come and visit Pyongyang sometimes but that is not really necessary. In a litt...

On September 16th I made some predictions about the latest Times Higher Education (THE) world rankings and summit at Berkeley. My record is not perfect but probably a bit better than the professional pollsters who predicted a hung parliament at the last UK elections, a crushing defeat for Brexit and humiliation for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries. I predicted that Trump would not be invited to give a keynote speech. I was right but it was a pity. He would certainly have added a bit of diversity to a rather bland affair and he does seem to have a talent for helping unpromising beginners into successful careers, something that the current fad for value added ranking is supposed to measure. I also said that UC Berkeley as the summit host would get into the top ten again after falling to thirteenth last year. This has now become a tradition at THE summits. I suspect though that even THE will find it hard to get King's College London, the 2017 world summit host, into the top ...