by Jon Lackman | 2 June 2010 | Uncategorized
British art historians are concerned that proposed changes to the system by which their universities are classified and evaluated could diminish the reputation of art history there. Incidentally, the 2008 evaluations are available online (scroll to page 97). The quality of these rankings and their methodology are of course up for debate. That said, see below for the universities with the highest percentage of their “history of art, architecture and design” research activity judged to be of “world leading” quality:
1. University of East Anglia
2. University of Sussex
2. University of York
2. University of Glasgow
5. Courtauld Institute
5. University of Manchester
7. University of Birmingham
7. School of Oriental and African Studies
7. University College London
Meanwhile, American academics are still waiting for the National Research Council to release its now years-and-years-late report on its now thoroughly outdated (congressionally mandated) ratings of graduate programs.
In its defense, the NRC asserted recently in a powerpoint presentation, “There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. We spent a lot of time trying to get universities to provide comparable data and developing our model. In most fields, and especially now, doctoral faculty change relatively slowly, as do patterns of publication. We would like to update the study in the next two years. Now that we have developed the statistical machinery, it is a data updating task, which could be carried out on-line. But, we will need to obtain funding.”
New “history and history of art” rankings out now from The Guardian.