On university rankings and global asymmetries

Universities across the world, including our own, are being quietly but profoundly reshaped. Corporatization, commercialization, and metrification, amplified by global university rankings and politicized governance, are transforming the university from a public institution into a competitive enterprise. The result is a narrowing of what we mean by “excellence,” privileging what can be counted over what truly counts, reinforcing global inequalities, and pressuring universities — especially in the Global South — to conform to external standards.

This is not an abstract concern. It affects how we teach, what research gets done, whose knowledge is valued, and how societies think about themselves.

The modern university was founded on a revolutionary idea: the pursuit of knowledge free from external control. This freedom was never meant as a privilege for academics, but as a necessity for society. The university was envisioned as an institution where scholars could pursue truth wherever it might lead, free from religious dogma, political authority, or economic interests. A space where people could think critically, challenge orthodoxies, and imagine alternative futures.

But universities founded in colonial contexts, carried a deep paradox. The University of the Philippines (UP) was established by American colonizers in 1908 as an instrument of imperial rule, designed to reproduce colonial hierarchies and knowledge systems. Yet over time, it evolved into a site of anti‑colonial and nationalist scholarship, student activism, and critical inquiry. Its history shows that even institutions with colonial origins can become spaces of decolonization, challenging Western epistemologies, developing curricula grounded in local experience, and providing room for scholars to critically examine society and power.

Today, these ideals of academic freedom, critical thinking, and the university’s public mission are under strain. In many countries, public funding hasn’t kept pace with the growth and costs of higher education. Public universities are pushed to look for income beyond government support. New technologies, especially AI, and the rapid expansion of higher education worldwide are forcing us to confront difficult questions about access, funding, and purpose.

Faculty face heavier workloads and fiercer competition for shrinking research budgets. Tightening visa regulations and geopolitics restrict the mobility of students and scholars. And academic freedom is under constant threat from political actors who see universities as threatening to established interests.

These pressures raise a fundamental question: what kind of institution is the university meant to be?

I use the term “public good” deliberately. Yes, universities benefit individuals, but universities also create broader social value. They generate new knowledge, address complex problems, serve the public. UNESCO categorizes education and knowledge in this sense as public good. Universities advance medicine, contribute to our understanding of climate change and social inequalities. They create spaces for critical inquiry where scholars can challenge power structures and examine uncomfortable truths. They train citizens to help build the economy and participate in public life. They help communities through research grounded in local realities and responsive to local needs.

These aren’t incidental benefits. They define what universities are for. Yet these public dimensions are precisely what erode when universities are governed primarily by rankings, market pressures, and short-term performance metrics.

One visible manifestation of this transformation is the creeping corporatization and contractualization of higher education. Universities are increasingly run like businesses, where performance metrics, revenue targets, and cost-cutting measures dictate priorities. Administrative structures now mirror corporate hierarchies. University leaders are increasingly expected to act as CEOs, prioritizing revenue generation over academic excellence and public purpose. Growing numbers of staff are employed on temporary contracts with low pay and little security, undermining both their well-being and the quality of their work.

Education itself is being recast as a private commodity. Professors are treated as managed employees, students become clients and customers, and knowledge becomes a product. The university experience is narrowed to employability, often at the expense of intellectual development and social responsibility.

When institutions prioritize revenue and market positioning, the kinds of knowledge production that serve society but do not generate immediate profits or high citation counts become marginalized. This market-driven model is fundamentally at odds with the public mission of universities.

Perhaps one of the most insidious drivers of this transformation is the growing obsession with metrics and global university rankings.

As a mathematician, I am not opposed to numbers. But I worry when our worth as institutions of learning, knowledge production, and public service is reduced to numbers, and we lose sight of the bigger picture and the real impact of our contributions. Numbers can be seductive. They lend the appearance of credibility while creating a false sense of objectivity. We must guard against letting superficial precision overshadow the deeper, more time-consuming evaluation of intellectual and artistic work.

The rise of “audit cultures” has normalized assigning numbers to academic output and ranking institutions, colleges, and individual scholars. These produce control rather than creativity, conformity rather than curiosity. Studies show that audit cultures produce tighter top-down controls and power hierarchies rather than leveling playing fields.

The increasing metrification of academia is reshaping university agendas, distorting university priorities, and undermining our values. We no longer read, we just count!

Consider the world university rankings by Times Higher Education and QS (Quacquarelli Symonds). Their emergence in these last two decades has created a hyper-competitive landscape, where citations, international faculty, and industry income have become proxies for institutional prestige. These rankings privilege what are easily counted — publication counts, citation indices, and international collaborations — while sidelining equally important measures such as public service, community impact, teaching quality, and holistic student development. Universities are pushed to pursue what is measurable rather than what is meaningful.

The pressure to climb rankings favors disciplines that generate “high-impact” publications, often in STEM fields, while marginalizing socially critical areas such as the humanities and social sciences. Hiring and promotion increasingly rely on impact factors and citation indices, replacing scholarly judgment with bean-counting. Faculty are nudged toward safe, fundable projects instead of bold or locally grounded research. Combined with growing administrative demands, this publish-or-perish culture has contributed to widespread burnout and mental health crises.

Metric obsession is encouraging “salami-slicing” of papers to increase publication count, gaming citation networks, publication in predatory journals, and participation in weak conferences that are merely profit-making scams. Goodhart’s Law warns us: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Gaming metrics inevitably distorts behavior.

I am not naive about political realities — public universities must demonstrate value to taxpayers. But there’s a difference between evaluation and bean-counting.

Digitized citation databases like Scopus and Google Scholar have accelerated this trend. Metrics like the h-index or journal impact factor have become simplistic shorthand for quality. Rankings have become branding devices, packaging education as a consumer product.

More troubling still, global university ranking systems privilege Western definitions of excellence, English language journals, Anglo-American institutional models, and Global North funding priorities. Universities in the Global South are pressured to meet these standards, reinforcing academic dependency and weakening locally relevant, decolonial scholarship. Elite institutions get to define what counts as legitimate knowledge while important work rooted in local realities struggles for recognition. This directly undermines the capacity of universities to serve as public goods responsive to their own societies.

For too long, excellence has been defined by competition, rewarding visibility, citation counts, and selectivity. This often narrows inquiry, discourages risk-taking, and reinforces the dominance of well-resourced institutions. It’s time to widen the lens.

True quality lies not only in outputs, but in the conditions under which knowledge is produced: academic freedom, secure employment, mentoring, collaboration, integrity, and care. When research agendas are driven primarily by market needs or donor preferences, questions that challenge existing power structures are sidelined. This weakens the university’s critical role in society.

So what do we do? We need to reassert the university’s public mission: critical thinking and academic excellence, inclusive education, meaningful research, and service to society. We must engage critically with rankings and explore alternative systems of assessment — public service, social impact, teaching quality. Use rankings, if at all, as one tool among many, not the defining measure.

We must resist rewriting institutional missions to fit indicators. Focus instead on creating the conditions that make good teaching and research possible: mentoring, fair workloads, secure career pathways, academic freedom, research integrity, and making knowledge accessible in multiple languages. Reward collaboration and locally grounded inquiry, especially when their impact lies beyond citation windows. Balance quantitative indicators with qualitative, mission-aligned measures so universities remain spaces of genuine learning, innovative research, and public service.

Metrics can be useful but they become problematic when allowed to define what matters and replace judgment, mission, and ethics.

This brings me to academic freedom, which is not peripheral to excellence, but is its precondition.

Academic freedom is essential to the university’s dual role as knowledge producer and social critic. The University of the Philippines (UP), founded by colonizers yet evolved into a decolonizing institution, has long grappled with its role as both state-funded national university and defender of academic freedom. During Martial Law, when dissent was suppressed, UP became a space of resistance.

Academic freedom is not an abstract entitlement. It is a practice — shaped in difficult questions, principled dissent, and scholarship that amplifies marginalized voices. Its purpose is to equip society with clarity and courage, allowing evidence, reason, and ethical judgment to prevail over fear and force. Academic freedom fulfills its value precisely when scholars pursue uncomfortable truths, challenge orthodoxies, speak for the excluded.

In times of disinformation and polarization, universities must stand as bastions of reasoned debate, evidence-based argument, and principled dissent. This freedom to think and speak out is what enables the university to serve as a moral compass for society — a public good function that no other institution can adequately fulfill.

Public universities are not corporations and should not be run as such. While we must be responsible stewards of resources, our primary accountability is to education, scholarship, and the public good. Not to balance sheets, or KPIs. Universities are human communities, not just systems of production. The well-being of students, faculty, and staff must be central. Our institutions must foster not only productivity but also dignity, creativity, joy, and meaning in learning and discovery.

The university we need is not a factory of metrics, but a sanctuary for thought, for meaningful research, teaching, and public service. It cultivates critical minds and ethical citizens, contributes to social progress, and remains a space for imagining better futures.

Fidel Nemenzo, D.Sc., is a professor of mathematics and former chancellor of the University of the Philippines Diliman. This article is based on a keynote talk delivered at the Berlin University Alliance and Berlin Center for Global Engagement meeting on “Beyond Excellence in International Research Cooperation,” Nov. 27, 2025, at the Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.