U-MultiRank ambitious, but lacking critical mass to face up to World University Rankings

Times Higher Education rankings editor Phil Baty outlined his initial views on the European Commission’s new project to rank the world’s universities, U-MultiRank, in a letter published by EuroScientist magazine on 9 June 2014. The letter is reproduced in full here.
Back in 2012, the UK’s universities and science minister David Willetts warned that the European Commission’s project to develop a new approach to global university rankings, U-MultiRank, risked being dismissed as a self-serving exercise.
It could be viewed as “an attempt by the Commission to fix a set of rankings in which European universities do better than they appear to do in the conventional rankings”, he told a House of Lords European Union Committee inquiry on the modernisation of higher education. Two years on, now that the first ranking is live and we can see which institutions have – and more importantly which have not – chosen to join the bold experiment, it would seem that the minister’s warning was remarkably prescient. More...