UGent drops below KUL in Shanghai Ranking, and we really shouldn’t care.

My dear colleagues in the PR department will probably not devote a news article to this topic this year, but last week, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking) was published, and for the first time in recent memory, Universiteit Gent finished as #2 instead of #1 in the national ranking. (For Law, by the way, we still seem to be #1, for what it’s worth.)

Over the past few years, my university has steadily dropped down in the Shanghai ranking. And I personally believe that we should not worry about it. In fact, rather than not worrying, we should be proud of this result. And why is that? Because my best guess is that this result is a natural corollary of the very humane HR policy that my institution has been implementing since 2018.

Last year, I was hired as a full-time junior professor of law. Since then, I have never been happier professionally. How come? About six years ago, Ghent University was fed up with the extreme pressure on junior researchers in academia, which had even led to outcries in the mainstream media. As a result, junior professors at Ghent no longer have their contracts renewed and are no longer promoted on the basis of strict hand-counting criteria.

Unlike at many other universities, newly appointed professors are not required to submit or win x number of research project proposals in order to secure a share of the scarce external funding needed to hire more researchers. Of course, we are being highly motivated to participate in funding calls. But our intrinsic motivation to do so is not supplemented by the Damocles’ sword of being thrown out or not promoted in five years’ time if the funding agency’s jury is not convinced of the attractiveness of our proposal.

In contrast to many other universities, we are also free to determine our own output strategy – our own bibliography. Let me explain:

Like similar ranking systems, the Shanghai ranking attempts to quantify the overall quality of institutions by measuring, among other things, the number of “high-end publications” and the number of scientific citations of university affiliates, because these factors are supposed to indicate “impact”. And by “high-end”, we mainly mean publications in so-called “A1” journals, which are subject to a strict system of double-blind peer review, whereby (unpaid) anonymous fellow-experts are supposed to scrutinise each paper without knowing the identity of the (also unpaid and sometimes even paying) authors’ identities.

For me as a Belgian IP law researcher, publishing in such an A1 journal does not really make a lot of sense. At least in my field, these journals are often very expensive and unknown to national practitioners, which means that the articles are only read by a very selective club of fellow researchers with (paid) access through their institution. In addition, the peer-review and typesetting processes can take a very long time, making the article obsolete by the time it is published. It would therefore often make more sense to publish in other, perhaps national, journals – whether peer-reviewed or not. Because then a legal practitioner, such as a judge, might get a hold of your paper and actually use it to solve cases. But this is not (or hardly) counted as “impact” in academic rankings. Similarly, being cited in a court decision does not count as “impact” whereas the number of citations by other academics in A1 journals does…

There are many shortcomings in the academic peer review process. To quote colleague Prof. Lodewijk Van Dycke :

“In circumstances where key journals are owned by a small number of global publishers, where paywalls are the norm and peer review is done for free by academics, academic publishing has become a prime example of accumulation by dispossession.”

UGent cannot, of course, change this reality on its own. But around 2018, it decided to care less about this frenzy, and to allow its researchers to follow their own path and to develop and adapt a publication strategy tailored to their field and their work – even if this does not show up in the figures that represent academic “impact”.

I can only speak for myself of course, but being appointed as a tenure-track research professor in Ghent has not put me in the terrible academic rat race I have heard complained about for the last decade. Sure, we all have our share of (administrative, teaching and research-related) duties. And sure, my university has its challenges: there is a lot of room for improvement (in communication and infrastructure, for example) and frustrations do arise, but then I am not expected to read and mark 40 master’s theses under the auspices of senior professors, while preparing “excellent” project proposals to secure more funding. And I don’t have to have nightmares about not achieving the number of A1 publications I promised to deliver by next year, because I can rest assured that my current mandate will evolve into the next one if I continue to give my best.

To sum up, unlike some other universities, Ghent University seems to trust us young professors in our aspirations and our endeavours to try to build something in our fields of research. And the main example of this, is that appointed full-timers even get a budget equivalent to the salary of one full-time PhD student for four years to start off with – with (almost) no strings attached. But you can hardly translate that level of trust to a ranking, can you?

Let’s drop down in another few rankings if that’s the price we have to pay for a healthy and humane HR policy for young professors. And don’t worry, our education continues to improve: UGent continues to produce top students who go on to have impactful prestigious national and international careers.