yjblog

Sorry about the lack of chicken comics lately. However, after two consecutive all-nighters and generally not much sleep, I’m finally done with most of the assignments for this semester. Service will resume whenever I muster up enough cognitive ability to think of something mildly amusing.

Anyway, I noticed this in the local papers a week ago:

SINGAPORE, Oct 22 (Bernama) — Singapore has described as “not insightful” accusations that it is restricting academic freedom, The Straits Times reported.

Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that Singapore placed no restriction on what scholars could study, the newspaper reported.

“If we did have such a climate, it would be difficult to explain why NUS (National University of Singapore) was ranked 18th overall in the Times of London’s educational ranking and 10th in social sciences, just below six top US and three top UK universities,” he said.

(From the Malaysian National News Agency, because our press does such a spectacularly bad job of being searchable by Google News)

After having ranted my head off ([1], [2], [3]) about the university rankings and how meaningless they were, I’d resigned myself to being faced with the government and press mouthing off about NUS’s “18th rank” every so often.

Today, however, I noticed that the new Times Higher Education Supplement rankings have been released. Observe (last year’s rankings in brackets):

1 (1) Harvard University US
2 (3) Massachusetts Institute of Technology US
3 (6) Cambridge University UK
4 (5) Oxford University UK
5 (7) Stanford University US
6 (2) University of California, Berkeley US
7 (8) Yale University US
8 (4) California Institute of Technology US
9 (9) Princeton University US
10 (27) Ecole Polytechnique France
11- (52) Duke University US
11- (11) London School of Economics UK
13 (14) Imperial College London UK
14 (23) Cornell University US
15 (17) Beijing University China
16 (12) Tokyo University Japan
17- (20) University ofCalifornia, San Francisco US
17- (13) University of Chicago US
19 (22) Melbourne University Australia
20 (19) Columbia University US

(Source: THES, full rankings unavailable but Top 20 findable on Google News)

So, umm. Didn’t progress up the charts, did we now. On the bright side, we no longer have to face the “difficulty of explaining why NUS is ranked 18th overall”, right?

Disclaimer: I have nothing against NUS, and in fact suffer from a near-complete lack of opinion about the school (uh, it’s… hilly?). What gets on my nerves is the way our press and government have decided to glorify a meaningless number, just when I thought we were past such trivial comparisons (supposedly evidenced by the long-awaited near-complete abolishment of secondary school and JC rankings).

It amuses me so to think of how our nationalistic media will spin this, so… impress me, Straits Times. Please. Make me guffaw the way you did with “Singapore can help Russia make its mark”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.