Global university rankings’ influence in Canada: A senior administrators’ perspective

IntroductionGlobal university rankings have reconfigured the higher education (HE) landscape worldwide, triggering rapid change in policy and in how universities operate within their respective ecosystems (Hazelkorn and Mihut 2021). Yet, most characterizations of how Canadian universities deal with global rankings invite the impression that the academic environment in Canada may not be conducive to significant global rankings impacts. It is noteworthy, however, that this commonly held perception was not born in a vacuum. Several past studies have argued that while larger Canadian universities are most aware of the possible impact of global rankings on their international status, it is national rankings, particularly Maclean’s , which feature prominently in institutional discussions about strategy and promotion (Downing and Ganotice 2017; IHEP 2009; Page, Cramer, and Page 2010).Yet, there is a second strand of literature that suggests a sense of rather Canadian exceptionalism. Their argument goes along the following lines: Canadian university evinces an egalitarian ethos that runs counter to the vertical differentiation embedded in rankings (Zha 2013; Zaretsky 2017); rankings have little impact on Canadian students’ choice of school (Drewes and Michael 2006; Kong and Veall 2005; Pizarro Milian and Rizk 2018); unlike the United States, Canada does not have well-defined hierarchies between higher education institutions (HEIs) (Baker 2014; Hartley and Macdonald 2017); thus, the country has no national market for undergraduate credentials from a particular university (Adam 2017; Davies and Hammack 2005). Needless to say, this small literature portrays an academic environment characterized by an incentive structure and tradition that are not particularly rewarding for universities to espouse the logic of global rankings. Indeed, a review of the extant literature can only add to the sense that Canadian universities are nowhere near as affected by global rankings as many of their international peers.I contend that these accounts leave an important and under-theorized gap between them. But substantiation of this observation warrants further examination, a task I undertake in the next section. I utilize organizational literature and interviews with senior administrators from three major research universities to paint a far more nuanced picture of the role of rankings in the strategic management of universities. Compared to other jurisdictions, little is known about Canadian senior administrators’ perceptions of rankings, and whether or not these views induce efforts to alter universities’ behaviour in significant ways. Now that rebalancing universities away from rankings and toward real excellence in teaching, learning, and civic engagement is the lead concern of various stakeholders, it is more important than ever to study senior institutional leaders to understand what this rebalancing will entail. The ensuing sections address this organizational dimension. In doing so, the article opens up venues for comparative research across context and organizational culture, particularly beyond Westernized societies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.