 National Rankings of Physics Departments
Over the past couple of decades the ranking of academic institutions seems to have become increasingly more common and also an increasingly more important tool for evaluating their quality. Former UT President Dr. Wade Gilley made it his foremost priority to bring UT up among the top 25 public research universities. Our new president, Dr. John Shumaker, has also included national rankings for UT programs in his new eight-year benchmarks. At the departmental level we have often discussed ways to improve our own rankings. The first time I was seriously confronted with this issue was several years ago, when I was being interviewed for my current position. A substantial portion of the interview discussions focused on this issue. Our Board of Visitors has also seriously looked at rankings at nearly every meeting we have had with them.
I fully concur with all these efforts. Improving our ranking is important, but maybe my reasons for working hard on improving our rank are not always the same as for many people with whom I have discussed the issue. It seems to me that for many, the rankings are more like a sport, where the only thing that matters is to beat the others, independent of how that is accomplished. The rank becomes a goal in itself. This is the view I find difficult to support. To me the goal has to be to improve all aspects of our program in such a way that we become better and better on an absolute scale. If at the same time our "competitors" (i.e., other physics departments) are also improving their programs, we should be happy on their behalf and on behalf of physics education and research in the United States. In other words, we have to continuously strive to improve ourselves on an absolute scale. If, as a result of this, we improve our relative rank, we should be happy, but the improvement of the rank is not a goal in itself.
At the departmental level I am currently aware of two rankings. By far the most important is the National Research Council's evaluation of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States. These rankings were last completed in 1993 (published 1995) and at that time we were ranked 72 in the nation. This year US News & World Report published rankings of graduate physics programs for the first time and we were ranked at a shared 61-65 position. Whether this represents an improvement or is an artifact of different methodologies, I do not know. But in both cases the methodology is highly questionable. It consists basically of asking a lot of physicists (NRC asks a large group of physicists from all institutions and US News asks department heads) on their subjective assessment of the strength of the programs. Even if NRC collects a lot of "objective" data like number of published papers or number of citations per faculty member, etc., these data are not used in determining the rank. This methodology has the obvious shortcoming that older and more established programs, which probably have produced most of the reviewers, will get high rankings. Hopefully NRC will use more objective criteria in the future. An example of a better and more objective methodology is the University of Florida's attempt to rank research universities based on metrics like external research funding, endowment, number of graduates, number of faculty awards, etc. (see http://thecenter.ufl.edu/ for details). While no single one of these metrics gives a full picture, the combination of 10 metrics like these is definitely an improvement over the subjective methodology of the NRC.
Experience shows that improving the rank of a department or a university does not happen overnight. The changes in the Florida rankings are very slow and improvements of 10 positions over a time interval even as long as 10 to 20 years are rare. So lofty goals like improving our university ranking by 15 to 20 positions over 5 to 8 years are, for all practical purposes, unrealistic. This does not, however, imply that we should not have goals like this. Common goals are a strong motivator for improvement and for motivating faculty.
So now to the $10M question: how do we get better (and thereby maybe improve our rank)? In the long run there is only one way: consistently hiring top notch young faculty, who after 10 to 20 years will be at the top of their field. Having top-notch faculty members will, over time, also produce better teaching and thereby attract better students, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. Hiring new distinguished professors is also a powerful tool, primarily because distinguished professors makes it easier to attract great young people and secondly because they often bring in an immediate increase in research funding and new ideas for research programs. It is through improved strength in research that we can improve the quality of all aspects of our program in the long run. This principle applies not only at the departmental level but also at the university level. Too often over the past decade we at UT have seen positions allocated solely on where the teaching needs were most pressing. This is a typical stopgap measure that provides some instantaneous relief but simply perpetuates mediocrity down the road. UT should be run as a nationally ranked research university, not a regional teaching university.
Of course there is more to improving the quality of our physics program than just establishing high criteria for hiring new faculty. Strong efforts must be made to give the faculty optimal research and teaching support and to work with students on improving our curriculum and the quality of the teaching product we deliver. Overall I feel we have been doing well over the past decade by hiring a new group of outstanding faculty members, improving our curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level, improving our research quality measured in external research funds and published papers per faculty member, and in numerous other ways. I very much look forward to the next time all physics departments will be evaluated and ranked, because I am convinced that due to the hard and innovative work of all our department members that we have a much improved program. And who knows: maybe this will also lead to a higher ranking!
Cross Sections, Fall/Winter 2002 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on December 4, 2002. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu. |