pad University of Belgrade on the Shanghai list, there is a new reason for the government and the tabloids to settle accounts with the rector Vladan Đokić and put everything down to "blockades".
So, admittedly, the fact that he bragged earlier when his position on the same list was improved is a bit of a knock on the University's head.
And what is it actually? Shanghai list? It ranks universities only according to the criteria of the scientific work of teachers and researchers. Points are awarded for Nobel laureates, citations in other papers, publication in two professional journals...
It has nothing to do with studying and students, although it can be assumed that those universities that are at the forefront of scientific work have the same attitude towards working with students.
Thus, the Shanghai list came to him as a matter of prestige for the hundred or so largest universities that produce a mountain of Nobel laureates and have annual budgets that are measured in billions of dollars.
Lower on the list, where the University of Belgrade is - let alone the others in Serbia and the region - one recognized and cited scientist, say a mathematician, is enough to collect points and bring a jump of one hundred or two hundred places. And vice versa - if he retires, he can immediately drop by one hundred or two hundred places.
"Vreme" contacted two Serbian scientists working in the white world and asked them, as in a debate game, to write why the Shanghai List is important and why it is not important. Here are their arguments.
The Shanghai list is very important
"In the open European educational space of which Serbia is a part, borders for students practically do not exist. One of the main goals of our universities must be to attract the best young people from the country, the region and the rest of Europe. Otherwise, if we run out of students, we will run out of higher education institutions as well," writes Milovan Shuvakov, a scientist from the USA, who was previously the assistant minister in charge of higher education in Serbia.
Photo: Private archiveMilovan Shuvakov
"In this global market of knowledge, every advertisement is crucial, and a high position on international lists represents a visible recommendation. In this sense, the position on the Shanghai list can be important," says Shuvakov for "Vreme".
Jelena Branković, a researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin, states that, thanks to the Shanghai List, once a year the quality of science and higher education becomes news and a topic of conversation outside the academic world.
"People who are not normally interested in universities start to wonder who advanced, who failed, how and why. This is not specific only to the Shanghai list; on the contrary, attention is drawn, in different ways, to almost all international university rankings. The only thing that, for some reason, is particularly popular in Serbia is precisely this - Chinese production."
The Shanghai list is not really important
On the other hand, Shuvakov underlines that "the position on the Shanghai list does not say anything about the quality of teaching and study conditions."
"It measures exclusively the cumulative scientific output and the number of highly cited researchers by field, which are usually only a few. The scientific results of a university are important, but there are much better metrics of scientific productivity than this. If we want a realistic picture of education and the student experience, multidimensional rankings like Times Higher Education (THE) and the like are much more important to us," he adds.
Photo: Private archiveJelena Brankovic
Jelena Branković makes a similar argument. He states that the Shanghai list does not help in answering how good a university really is because it only measures what is easy to count - publications, citations, Nobel laureates.
"What remains beyond the reach of numbers and constitutes the essence - the quality of teaching, working and studying conditions, contribution to public life, the creation of new ideas - remains out of the picture. Instead of understanding what makes a university good, the Shanghai List asks us to replace the essential with the measurable," she concludes.
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