New Index Ranks GC Among Top 50 U.S. Research Universities
by Advocate Staff
The Graduate Center was ranked 36th
overall in the new Faculty Scholarly
Productivity Index, with a “Z score”
that is +0.52 above the national mean.
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A new and controversial faculty productivity index has ranked the CUNY Graduate Center 36th overall among the nation’s 50 leading research universities, with many programs, including Philosophy, English, and Art History ranking among the top ten in their disciplines. These new rankings are welcome news for the Graduate Center, which has worked hard to increase the standing of its various academic programs, but the controversial results have many critics and ivy-league administrators questioning the accuracy and the potential impact of the new ranking system.
The problem is that the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, or FSP as it’s called, measures each program and each university based exclusively on the number of scholarly publications, citations, grants, and awards produced by the faculty. The index, however, does not rank student satisfaction, student to faculty ratios, the scholarly impact of faculty publications, or the quantity and quality of scholarly instruction as part of its ranking system. In addition, many critics have complained that the FSP is based in part on partial and sometimes faulty information.
These problems have not stopped many of the Graduate Center publications or programs from touting their seemingly meteoric rise in the new ranking system. The English Department, for instance, which has already placed the new information on their general web site, moved from 23rd in the U.S News and World Report ranking to a very solid and notable 10th place in the FSP, coming in above Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile the Art History department came in an impressive 9th place, and in the aggregate field of Philosophy and Religious studies, the Graduate Center came in at number one, ahead of every other major university in the nation.
The index was originally conceived by Lawrence B. Martin, the Dean of Graduate Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a former anthropologist who has spent a good portion of his career studying faculty productivity. According to Martin, the index was created to offer a more objective and rigorous criteria for measuring scholarly achievement and evaluating graduate programs. In a January 2nd online interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Martin said the FSP was
“designed to provide higher education with a national perspective on scholarly activity at the discipline level. It is a broad measurement containing information on books published, journal articles published, citations of journal articles, research grants awarded, fellowships, honors and awards won… It is our hope that the availability of clearly defined and transparently presented data on scholarly work will promote improvements in American universities that should result from better and more strategic decision making, informed by quantitative data.”
Martin’s decision to design and implement a new measurement system for ranking graduate programs came in part out of the frustration of waiting for the new National Research Council’s ranking of graduate schools and departments, which was last published over a decade ago in 1995, and a concern about the continued over reliance on the less rigorous U.S. News and World Report rankings, which the magazine publishes yearly.
The for-profit index, although funded in part by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was designed exclusively for the company Academic Analytics, which charges academic clients as much as $30,000 for three years of detailed analysis of university and department rankings. These rankings are achieved through a complex algorithm that measures the per capita output of faculty members based on journal and book publications, awards, government grants, and citations by other scholars and researchers. Administrations may then conceivably use this data to compare their output to other universities or departments, make decisions about funding or reorganizing particular academic programs, hiring new faculty, or changing requirements for tenure. In fact, because the index focuses largely on publications and awards, and because rankings can be greatly affected by the number of faculty publications in any given department, the pressure to increase publication requirements for tenure or promotion, and thus, increase department rankings could be a problem if the FSP becomes the new standard in ranking graduate schools.
Besides the fact that the index focuses solely on scholarly productivity, critics complain that much of the data used to put the new index together may have been based on outdated or incomplete information. Because it must by necessity record and process each faculty member’s scholarly output at a given institution, the index, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, uses a program that relies heavily on the internet and publication databases such as Scopus, a database that collects publication data for over 15,000 journals, and, surprisingly enough, Amazon.com, whose book database is reportedly exactly the same as the Catalog for the Library of Congress.
Faculty membership within the thousands of departments analyzed in the study, is similarly determined almost exclusively from online sources, leading some critics to complain that, as is often the case, some of the faculty members listed on university web sites were not necessarily employed at that particular university or in that particular department at the time of the survey. The Graduate Center English Department, for instance, continued to list Louis Menand, a highly prolific and regularly cited scholar, as a member of the English faculty even after he had left the program to take a job at Harvard University, on whose web site his name was also listed as a faculty member.
In an effort to overcome these kinds of problems Academic Analytics sent out a list of faculty members to each institution asking for corrections, but, according to the Chronicle’s article, of the more than 250 institutions that were contacted only 133 responded to the request for corrections. This potential discrepancy, critics say, could considerably affect the rankings of various departments in the survey.
Despite its critics, however, many administrators and department chairs are very happy with the new ranking system. Our own Bill Kelley, for instance, told 365 5th that he was “delighted with these results,” and that they “document, with striking clarity, the renaissance this great university has experienced across the last several years.”
