Opinion
As another set of rankings is set to emerge this weekend, it’s important to reflect on what really matters in HE – and then consider what we measure.
My first job in higher education was at ANU. Ian Chubb reigned supreme as Vice-Chancellor, Lee-ann Norris was my immediate boss and in between running the media and comms operations, they gave me the task of redefining the narrative of what was then a great institution.
Well, that was the way I saw it. The VC just wanted what he would call his ‘Boast Book’, and I was given free reign to write the story of the institution’s history and present. The first of the great rankings systems – what was then known as the Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking – was just coming out (in 2003), and the Boast Book would help position ANU with colleagues, funders, donors and agents.
The existing information about the university was pretty turgid, so I set to work researching, writing and refining at length. Ultimately, the Boast Book was beautiful and appeared to be very effective, but no doubt my greatest contribution to the institution through the research process was digging up another Nobel Prize winner.
Nobel Prize winners carried great weight in the ranking, (and in turn significant weight in student recruitment etc). ANU had hitherto claimed only four – Florey, Eccles, Doherty and Zinkernagel (Brian Schmidt hadn’t won his at this point). However, working through a range of sources it was clear that John Harsanyi had done some of his early work on game theory at ANU. I wrote it up, the Shanghai index recognised the university as having five Nobel winners, and it was one small part of the marketing renaissance that considerably strengthened the fortunes of Australia’s National University for a time. Harsanyi continues to be claimed by the university today.
Beyond flagrant self-indulgence, there are a number of reasons to recount the story now.
- The latest version of these rankings, now known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities comes out tomorrow. Number of Nobel Prize winners is still a key indicator, for better or worse.
- An institution’s reputation – and their ranking – does not reflect all available facts. There are too many staff, too many stories, too many metrics – and both rankings and perception are built on a narrow, subjective slice of those. Marketing has a critical role in this that is often undervalued – to craft a credible, fact-based vision based not just on institutional strategy but also market differentiation. This is a market profile beyond rankings, not just because of them.
- Measurement is essential, and you can measure almost anything – but we don’t. While compliance and institutional vanity requires a multitude of measurements, very little time is spent looking at other measures that could better tell the story – like Harsanyi. Identifying a small number of persuasive measures that matter most to audiences and unveiling them in a fresh way so they care, is the critical essence of effective communication here.
The final reason to tell the story is the most important – about choosing what we measure, and then asking why those measurements are the right ones. This is critical because those measurements need to be provable and presented so they are relevant to our audiences.
The main reason why I was thinking about measurement was measurement of the personal kind, based on an event last weekend.
More than 100 people packed into a hall in Benalla last weekend to celebrate my mum’s 90th Birthday. One or two were work friends. About a third were family. And the rest were people she had met at varying stages of her life who loved her.
Around 10 years ago I interviewed a world-renowned expert in palliative care from Flinders Uni, and amongst a range of wise things he said about death, he said one thing that stuck: Nobody gets to the last days of their life saying “I wish I had spent more time in the office”. Tell that to your LinkedIn buddies.
My Mum is uncommonly clever, but hasn’t spent her life applying her brain to conventional pursuits, which I never really understood until this party event.
She did a Master of Science degree, studying physics and then becoming the only woman in Australia to work in nuclear medicine at the time. She was a pioneer, working on new forms of radiotherapy and conducting experiments on nuclear fallout from the Maralinga tests in her spare time.
She had an amazing, rewarding scientific career ahead of her, but instead ditched that and moved to Indonesia and then a succession of small rural towns, doing all sorts of things with community, church and education. Far lower status, far less money, far less use of her natural academic gifts, but instead applying her capabilities where she saw people needing them. She wasn’t always the best at doing those things, but she did them when others didn’t.
As I watched the 120 guests hook into the chicken sandwiches, gelato, brownie and lemon tarts we had been making all week, I was left pondering. Would a career as an internationally-recognised STEM pioneer have been better for my Mum? She could have done that work far more easily than the hard graft of starting a music group for kids, or starting up a youth centre, or building an Indonesian language teaching program in tiny country schools – and she would have earned a lot more plaudits.
On the other hand, with my different life course and slightly more conventional career, would I even fill a phone box with friends who would volunteer to drive a couple of hours to a party by the time I notch up 90?
I finally realised my Mum had pursued a life very different to the status and financial security and conventional markers of achievement that I and much of the rest of society tend to gravitate towards. I don’t think her course is necessarily better, or worse; but it’s just her.
Unconventional life strategies can’t be measured by conventional metrics – just as organisational strategies can’t all be evaluated by generic markers or rankings.
In terms of my Mum’s, life strategy, if the goal was a positive impact on others and the measure is the number of non-family members voluntarily appearing at a 90th birthday on a Winter Saturday, then she has absolutely knocked that strategy out of the park.
The career evaluation metric just didn’t occur to me until it was in front of me, eating sandwiches and kindly laughing at my gags.
Which is not that far from the plight of Harsanyi – a man whose life achievements were ignored by his ANU community until it was time to ask whether we had the measurement parameters wrong all along.