As the rankings grow, so do efforts to game them. In a 2014 U.S. News ranking of global universities, the mathematics department at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University landed in seventh place, right behind Harvard. The department had been around for only two years but had somehow leapfrogged ahead of several giants of mathematics, including Cambridge and MIT. At first blush, this might look like a positive development. Perhaps MIT and Cambridge were coasting on their fame while a hardworking insurgent powered its way into the elite. With a pure reputational ranking, such a turnaround
...more
