The race for excellence – A marathon not a sprint

By Jamil Salmi. What chance does a university stand to be among the best, if it does not have hundreds of years of experience? The top 10 universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (2011) were all founded before 1900, and two are more than eight centuries old. As is the case with good wines, academic excellence requires a wealth of expertise, care and a long maturity period. However, this notion has been challenged recently on several counts. First, the regular publication of annual global rankings appears to imply that significant progress could be expected from one year to the next. Second, the decision of several countries to step up investment in support of their elite universities, under various "Excellence Initiatives", shows their determination to obtain drastic improvement within a few years. Finally, several universities were recently created in emerging economies (such as Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia) with the declared ambition of rapidly becoming "world-class". Read more...