Mass democracy and the universities

A well-known and commonly mentioned situation that the past fifty years have witnessed an opening of higher education, a radical increase in student numbers, which is a phenomenon that has been registered and studied in numerous ways (Guri-Rosenblit, Šebková, & Teichler, 2007). One of the aspects of this process is directly related to the issue of rankings, namely the new information market and communication situation established in this wake of higher educational democratisation (or as it is sometimes negatively referred to: its “massification”).

Such students obtained admission which necessarily increased the need for information on higher education in social groups who had had neither direct experience of nor information channels to universities. Besides, they lacked the vocabulary and conceptual knowledge to traditionally evaluate university performance. Therefore, in this new information market, you need information that is as easy to understand as possible - and the rankings meet this need.

Decision-makers do not take for granted the value of higher education, the interpretation and acceptance of university performance. In a mass democracy, what matters to them is what the electorate thinks about any social phenomenon. They have worked out the “complicated formula” that a scholar's vote counts for the same as that of the least educated citizen.

Of course, the decision-making politician meets with universities in proposals or in person during visits etc., yet as a politician, he is influenced primarily by the knowledge he has obtained about higher education from the media– since this knowledge is relevant to his electorate too, who also get their information from the same source.

This leads us to my second key concept, the medialization.

Medialisation

What is “medialization” generally?

The media experience overrides the direct experience. This means more than just obtaining information from the media for our private and public decisions (Meyrowitz, 1985).

“Being in the media” has become a form of existence, in other words, the boundaries between “the thing itself” and the communication about it are dissolving.

It's the same with universities: it is largely their position in the media that determines the social perception of them.

But, when academia comes to the topic of higher education, journalists are in a difficult situation for two reasons: except for a few exceptions, they do not have suitable and deep understanding of the characteristics of university performance, and their readers are even less informed about this world. And then they can use the rankings.

A function of the medialisation in mass democracy: the reactivity

Despite academic reservations and serious methodological scruples, rankings have a regulatory effect on the functioning of higher education, which is explained by reactivity (Espeland & Sauder, 2007) on the organisation-sociological level. In this process, universities bristle somewhat at the state of “being measured”, it is more general, however, that due to internal and external expectations of a better ranking placement, they influence their operation even by shaping their institutional identity (Wedlin, 2004). The state of “being measured” has a permanent ranking observation effect, similarly to Foucault's description of the state of being observed in prisons which prevails even if the prisoner is not actually being observed by anyone (Foucault, 1977).

But this “being measured” situation in this media-age is equal with the “being communicated” in the mass-media. And, as we have seen above, university rankings are the most appropriate form of information on higher education. This is why the rankings have an impact on universities. In other words, a completely external and alien effect (the logic of mass media) shapes the internal functioning of the university.

So, by the millennia, universities' meritocracy has been relativized by the general medialisation of mass democracy. University rankings and especially global rankings among them, are by now able to exert such strong influence on the operation of higher education, because the immunity of the higher education to external evaluation has become weak. This meritocracy is not primarily challenged by medialisation, but by one of the main contents of the phenomenon called “postmodernity”.

Postmodernity and the knowledge-relativism

Traditionally, in the university founding documents of Bishop Newmann or Professor/Minister Humboldt, excellence and quality are self-evident characteristics of a higher education institution, and they do not consider necessary to develop any professional external controlling mechanisms. Compared to this European university tradition, by the seventies and eighties, strong and influential narratives contended in the expanded market to “externally” evaluate university performance, and while rankings clearly lead in the media, solutions taken from business life, PR industry and the American academic tradition of latter years are more preferred in the institutions and their management. The contents of higher education performance were transformed as well. Knowledge accessible to many and innovation used in economy emerged besides, and more and more often replaced immanent scientific ideas and self-contained intellectual communities. This is also strongly linked to the phenomenon of managerialism.

These came together with the trend of postmodern relativism, the questioning of traditional social and knowledge positions. The fact that something is a “university” and that someone is a “university professor” does not mean that they cannot be judged by the public and the financers, i.e., the stakeholders. “Knowledge in itself does not enjoy privileges,” may say a layperson.

Relativism is a highly influential twentieth-century philosophy of science, which has made the postmodern conception of knowledge increasingly widespread since the 1960s. There is a lot of philosophical and social theoretical debate around it, which cannot be discussed here. What is important for us here is that it is this intellectual climate that has allowed university rankings to have such a strong impact on the academic world. It disrupts the traditionally meritocratic social and communicative status of the university. It does not accept meritocracy as such.

Is there a valid response to the ranking challenge?

The reason why I propose to look at university rankings in this framework is to understand that rankings are not some kind of contingent phenomena but are rooted in the university world and its socio-intellectual environment. It is therefore not worth fighting them.

The rankings are here and will be here in some form. They have many problems, but also many benefits, of course. They help to make universities face up to their fundamental challenges.

The professional value of higher education confident in its own performance, reconfirmed by the participation of excellent professors and students, or otherwise expressed in institution-organisational language, its autonomy can still be re-formulated, re-built in a world pervaded by the mass-media, the social media and management culture. Not only inspired by the social ideal of freedom and autonomy, but closely related to the essence of science, knowledge transfer and acquisition. The rationality of science, the dynamic balance of tradition and innovation are indispensable factors – acting both as a model for and as virtue of the western world (Polanyi, 1962).

The value of knowledge is what makes the world of universities so special amongst all the other training and development forms. A particular communicative and media presence of this value may improve competitiveness and enhance legitimacy. This communicative meritocracy is what I recommend as an alternative against the effects of mass democracy, mass media and relativism, which is weakening university autonomy, scientific performance, and the ethos of scientific knowledge.

The rankings are also worth looking at in this process. In such debates, it is also helpful to learn to interpret rankings in the context of the position of higher education as a whole.

There is of course much debate surrounding rankings in different higher education contexts. Higher education in the world and in each country is in a state of rebuilding, and the pandemic has brought new influences. Therefore, it is not only rankings but also university transformations that are the focus of debate. From the US and the UK to Serbia, Russia, Poland and Hungary, different socio-political views and movements are clashing. It is also interesting that, while rankings are generally accepted as a yardstick, as a motive, opinions differ sharply as to whether, for example, the organisational changes in Hungary, which were implemented very quickly with strong government action, result in better or worse performance and thus in a ranking position.

University rankings also need to be open to this self-reflection because it is not self-evident that they maintain a strong media and academic position. Two developments should serve as a warning in this respect.

On the one hand, the joint action of several European universities and science funding organisations criticising the one-sided dominance of a quantitative approach in research evaluation is receiving increasing attention. There have already been individual actions and broader speeches (Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA;¹ Leiden Manifesto for research Metri;² Hong Kong Principles³), but this has now reached the EU decision making level.

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)⁴ paper primarily addresses those responding to long-standing frustrations in the research community, essentially systematising and formalising into an action plan previous criticisms and plans for necessary reform of the way research is conducted. Within this, the one-sidedness of university rankings, which have been analysed in detail in previous peer reviews, is repeatedly highlighted.

Of course, it is not yet clear what impact this process will have. First of all, the major European higher education institutions have not yet joined and neither have the national higher education systems. However, it is possible that, if the EU takes this seriously, it will be reflected in national decision-making. The question then arises whether the universities and policy makers in the two clear leaders of the academic world, the US and China, will join in? And if so, is it not clear whether the media power of university rankings (which I have detailed in the paper) can be counterbalanced by such action?

Second, let's not forget the impact of the explosion of AI, the most popular topic in today's higher education discourse,⁵ on the rankings. First, the substantive issue is the mechanisation of scientific publications. This raises questions about the anomalies of the science-industry (mass production of publications, drying up of original ideas, decline of summarising-synthesising thinking, one-sidedly quantitative nature of quality assessment).

And this is where chatGPT is directly linked to university rankings. On the one hand, it draws even more attention to the questionable value of the most important indicator: the real value of such number of academic publications. On the other hand, chatGPT offers the users of the rankings, i.e., applying students, the media and decision-makers, an orientation tool that be competitive with the rankings.

Indeed, the success and power of rankings, and especially media-oriented rankings, is largely due to the fact that they offer an easy-to-use source of information about an inherently complex phenomenon that requires prior knowledge: academic performance. They organise some selected phenomena of the academic world in a form that is transparent to the layperson. These would otherwise only be known to the public after a longer period of research and by asking experts.

However, chatGPT can not only be an easily accessible answer to questions such as which is the best university, but can also personalise these answers: which is the best university for me if I want to work in molecular biology in a country with a nice climate, where there are many tennis courts near the university building and I want to work in a pharmaceutical research company with my degree? In other words, it does not require any more energy than asking a friend, while providing more personalised information than standard rankings.

These two factors combined, i.e., easy accessibility and personalised orientation, make the chatGPT-based information service competitive among university rankings. Of course, there have been ranking experiments in the past that have tried to provide rankings tailored to the preferences of students (SwissUp in Switzerland or UnivPress-PrivatRanking in Hungary), but the most mature and unique at global level is MultiRank. AI takes all this to a higher level by providing a marketing advantage with its own hype, on the one hand, and by being able to use not only the existing indicator database but also the infinite wealth of information about universities.

However, ranking providers have space for manoeuvre: they can “teach AI about universities”, drawing on their experience in information processing and outreach. How this becomes a business model for them is another matter, but the refreshing of the ranking world is inevitable. This in turn will also allow a rethinking of the analysis and critique of rankings.