In the midst of the rankings season, celebrating the results spewed forth from numerous deeply flawed rankings systems, we also see the emergence of those beautiful and rigorously measured lists of the 30 under 30 or 40 under 40 or the Chief self promotion officer of the year award.
Which begs a couple of important questions.
- When do I get mine?
- How is it that a sector seeking to build social licence and lure donors through precision and rigour is so quick to unblinkingly embrace indices they know to be flawed?
I have the answer for you of course, and it’s not what you think. I was one of the first to turn rankings into a marketing advantage working with Lee-ann Norris and the redoubtable Ian Chubb at ANU back in 2002.
They plucked me out like a pet rescue from a spin doctor job in Victoria and set me to work on Professor Chubb’s ‘boast book’ – a brochure explaining the value of ANU to key decision makers. At the time, national awareness of the existence of ANU was around 15% – focus groups across the country guessed that it was an insurance company, or just looked blank at the acronym.
I dug up an extra Nobel Prize winner affiliated to ANU (Harsanyi, his early work on Game theory at ANU had been overlooked by the-then Shanghai Zhou Tong ranking), pulled together a whole range of data to demonstrate excellence and impact and put it together in a publication that then found its way into the hands of key players and rankings reviewers around the globe.
The rankings number was a door-opener to several thousand words building a fact-based case attesting to quality.
By time time we left, around three years later, the boast book, a reinvention of the media process, changes in communication and advertising strategy and deployment of fact-based messaging demonstrating relevance and impact had lifted national recognition of ANU to over 70%.
The point is, the rankings were a hook to demonstrate quality, but the battery of relevant facts that we presented alongside the ranking went far beyond the narrow confines of the ranking’s assessment and were the key to build recognition, respect and profile.
A couple of decades later, there are more indexes, more diverse measurements, and far more first prize ribbons. Rankings have tremendous potential PR power, but this can be fleeting if the brand as a whole doesn’t live up to the award (although it still carries some power in the student recruitment market, no matter how flimsy the index). Rankings are a greater curse, however, if they become the headline, rather than the hook. If they become the reason for being, and the primary definition of relevance and strategic success.
The same goes for individual awards. I think they are important. I think almost everyone likes to receive one. But they don’t hold a lot of value other than for some unsuspecting future employer if they don’t reflect the ongoing qualities and capabilities of the recipient.
Like the Ig Nobel awards. Perhaps we should have a 50 over 50 award – for the 50 people of exceptional potential who haven’t quite managed to achieve the career success they had hoped for or deserved. The award could be a golden contorted shoe, representing the crushed soul/sole of our would-be greats, who are no doubt still doing great things, just less heralded than their corner office colleagues?
Rankings will continue to be contentious, particularly given that our nation hasn’t bothered to agree on an effective way to measure research performance at a national level since 2018. But no matter how rigorous, they also need to be surrounded by a broader demonstration of relevance and impact.
As an old chief of staff used to tell me: “Don’t bother coming back unless you have six yarns (from your next assignment) mate.” Oh and also, “You’re only as good as your next byline.”
Not that the HE sector would ever stoop to base exploitation of staff, but there is some truth to the latter comment in our attempt to embrace the public. Brand equity in higher education is not what it used to be in the 2010’s (but maybe more like it was in the early 2000s, when universities were far less frequently seen or heard).
Maybe you’re only as good as your next graduate / discovery. In which case you need to assemble a better fact-based story to win over the punters, rather than relying on the rosette from a far-flung publishing house.
