The first horrifying pictures are beginning to arrive... people's lives washed away by the terrible flood... children lying in the mud, crying... but, yeah, too obvious... fill in the rest yourself.
Now here's a thing. Brer Tony made a speech today in which he said "Of the top 20 universities in the world today, only two are now in Europe."
Only two are now in Europe? What, some of the others used to be in Europe but have suffered continental drift.
And which two universities could he be referring to? Possibly this is the list he was using, in which case the two in quesion are Oxbridge and Camford... funny that he should use an example that only refers to the UK and not really to the rest of Europe. Go top fifty, and he could have had his pick of Imperial, Zurich, Utrecht, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, and Edinburgh. But he didn't.
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2 comments:
Interesting that several of those you mention are not the main universities of those places - or at least, it's not the University of Munich or the University of Zurich you're talking about.
The most striking feature of the list is of course the overwhelming dominance of US universities - the one and only reason Europe doesn't feature much near the top of the chart.
(Though have you read the judging criteria? 'Quality of Education' is measured entirely by how many Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals your students go on to get. 20% of the overall weighting is the number of articles published in popular magazines 'Nature' and 'Science'.)
I'm not sure that I would label "Nature" and "Science" as 'popular' magazines since (a) loads of people hate them and (b) "popular" magazines are things like Scientific American and New Scientist, and do not have refereed articles. Nature and Science are proper, grown up academic journals. The main problem with using them as a yardstick is (a) it tends to royally screw anyone in arts/humanities/social sciences who don't fit in there and don't really have an equivalent outlet and (b) it also screws people like me, who do science but would never publish in science, in contrast to biologists, who as a matter of course will hope to get their stuff into these journals. In other words, this is fine for evaluating "traditional" "hard" "sciences" like Bio, and to a lesser extent Phys and Chem, but a bit of a git for just about everyone else.
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