Ranking and the multiplication of reputation: reflectionsfrom the frontier of globalizing higher education

Francis L. Collins1 • Gil-Sung Park2

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract Over the last two decades, enumeration has become a critical force in crafting

the governmentalities of globalizing higher education. Whether in the glossy Web sites and

documentation of the world’s ‘top universities’ or in more fine-tuned regional and subject

guides, accreditation schemes, journal metrics or h-indexes, technologies for measuring

and ranking academic performance have not only created new imaginaries of reputation

but also started to reshape institutional behavior in the pursuit of enhanced performance. In

this paper, we critically explore these governmentalities of globalizing higher education

through a discussion of the competing logics and landscapes of reputation and ranking in

two leading universities in South Korea. Our analysis draws attention to the ways in which

university rankings have generated a new multi-scalar geography of institutional reputa-

tion, the mismatch between quality, reputation and ranking, and the new kinds of insti-

tutional behaviors that are emerging to respond to the proliferation of ranking systems.

Through this analysis, our paper offers two critical contributions to the current literature on

university reputation. Firstly, we offer a critique of the high-level metrics used in uni-

versity ranking and their implications for the quality of institutions. Secondly, we also

argue for more nuanced accounts of ranking and reputation by scholars of higher education

and in particular a greater emphasis on their successes and failures, the competing logics

and unexpected outcomes of ranking and their implications for the future of universities.

Keywords University ranking � Reputation � Globalization � Higher education �Governmentality � Asia � South Korea

& Gil-Sung Parkgspark@korea.ac.kr

Francis L. Collinsf.collins@auckland.ac.nz

1 Geography, School of Environment, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1010,New Zealand

2 Department of Sociology, Korea University, Anam-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 136-701,Republic of Korea

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High EducDOI 10.1007/s10734-015-9941-3

Introduction

Rankings have become an all-pervasive feature of higher education landscapes (Hazelkorn

2011). From global lists of the ‘top universities’, to subject guides, accreditation schemes,

journal metrics and h-indexes, ranking systems compare and order the spaces of higher

education in increasing intricacy. They generate discourses of difference and distinction

that have far reaching effects in the lives of faculty and students, the spaces of university

campuses, the investment decisions of governments and the constitution of knowledge.

Rankings are a ‘calculative technology’ par excellence; they make legible the tangible and

intangible features of universities, draw them into fields of equivalence and generate

imaginative geographies of institutional difference. They are, then, critical tools in con-

structing reputation, the image of quality, trustworthiness and influence that an institution

has in the eyes of its various publics (Vught 2008).

Reputation can never, however, be completely scripted by the discourses produced in

rankings, and despite their claims, such rankings do not operate in a world of pure

objective measurement. Rather, reputation is also generated over the longue duree and the

role that different universities play in processes of local, national and transnational edu-

cation and development. Reputation is also established through relations with other actors,

with governments, civil society, private sector, students, families and alumni, and the

broader publics of national and transnational society. Rankings can serve as a challenge to

these established positions, disrupting accepted hierarchies and instigating new individual

and institutional strategies and behaviors for performance in assessments. As metrics

proliferate at international, regional, domestic, disciplinary and institutional scales—uni-

versities are faced with multiple publics for which reputation can be interpreted in different

ways and with different implications.

Over the last decade, the leading universities of South Korea have become key sites for

the articulation of these competing logics and landscapes of ranking and reputation. This is

not least because South Korean institutions have, like their East Asian peers, increasingly

engaged in wide-ranging international strategic visions, to build international networks and

connections, contribute to national innovation systems and become sites for the transna-

tional circulation of faculty and students. Reputation is both a key element of success in

and an outcome of these strategies, and ranking metrics have become one of the main

technologies for planning, implementing and assessing these new institutional behaviors.

Yet, many South Korean universities also have obligations within national spaces of higher

education, and their reputations therein remain important both in resourcing the institution

and as a foundation for transnational engagement. In this respect, new calculative tech-

nologies of ranking also intersect and sometimes compete with established hierarchies of

reputation, providing both opportunities to solidify institutional positions and risks asso-

ciated with negative visibility in these schemas.

In this paper, we explore the competing logics and landscapes of reputation and ranking

through an examination of Korea University (KU) and Seoul National University (SNU).

Arguably the leading private and public universities in South Korea, KU and SNU rep-

resent the frontier of different forms of globalization in higher education and demonstrate

the ways in which reputation intersects with aspirations for both national status and global

emergence. Our paper is based on analysis of interviews with officials at these universities

and the different visions, strategies and behaviors for institutional reputation. Drawing on

the literature on the governmentalities of higher education, we provide a close reading of

these interviews that demonstrates the local articulation of wider processes, the multi-

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scalar geography of reputation that emerges and the institutional behavior that follows a

focus on ranking as reputation. The paper begins by introducing the literature around

ranking, calculative practices and governmentality, before exploring the extant cultures of

ranking and hierarchy in South Korean higher education. We then examine the experience

at KU and SNU by focusing on new geographies of reputation and their implications for

practice, before addressing the limits and slippages involved in seeking to measure quality

and establish institutional reputation.

Ranking and reputation: calculative technologies and governmentalorderings

Reputation has long been a key feature of higher education, with images of quality and

prestige being pivotal for the production of ‘distinction’ among institutions (Bourdieu

1984). Nonetheless, there has been an amplification of the ‘reputation race’ (Vught 2008)

that involves a shift from local to global competition between universities (Marginson

2007). One key feature of this increased emphasis on reputation has been the move from

relatively diverse institutional discourses to a narrower range of metric-based assessments

(Hazelkorn 2011). This includes university ranking as well as benchmarking, accreditation

systems, research assessment exercises and the myriad of internal systems for monitoring

and auditing institutions (Lewis 2011). These are ‘calculative practices’ (Miller 2004),

systems of measurement that make the characteristics, actions and positions of individuals

and institutions legible. They serve the role of both articulating programs of government

and reconstituting institutions and individuals in reference to governmental discourses.

The ranking systems developed and promoted by groups like such as Quacquarelli

Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and Academic Ranking of

World Universities (ARWU) represent the leading edge of this new governmentality of

global higher education. They are a form of ‘audit culture’ (Power 1997) that actively

extends a numerical imagination of the world, where statistics and ranks coherently arrange

the huge range of materials and information that circulate about universities. Their growing

importance is critically tied to and generative of the globalization of higher education

(Larner and Le Heron 2005). Indeed, while within a national context familiarity with the

histories and significance of institutions generates publicly accepted reputations and ranks,

the shift beyond the nation-state engendered in globalization is accompanied by uncer-

tainty and unfamiliarity (Guyer 2014). Numerical accounts and hierarchies of universities

work because they provide a familiar legibility to unfamiliar institutions, ‘they decon-

textualize so thoroughly that measurements and rankings travel so widely and are easily

inserted into new places and for new uses’ (Shore and Wright 2015: 23). Numbers and

ranking systems create a landscape of higher education that is thoroughly hierarchized and

amenable to intervention.

University rankings then represent one way in which ‘governing by numbers’ has

become a defining feature of contemporary life (Shore and Wright 2015; Power 1997;

Miller 2004). Their role is not simply to measure and rank institutions but also to provide a

template for reform strategies. They constitute a key feature of contemporary govern-

mentality or the ‘conduct of conduct’ involved in organizing the world to secure particular

outcomes, ‘to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such

and such ends may be achieved’ (Foucault 1991: 95). As rankings have come to dominate

notions of university reputation, they have been accompanied by a range of new rank-

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seeking visions, strategies and behaviors: Universities establish new managerial positions

focused on assessing and rearranging academics, departments and faculties to achieve

higher ranks (Larner and Le Heron 2005); academics are encouraged to become ‘re-

sponsible and calculating individuals’ (Miller 2001) who undertake rank-seeking behavior;

and university performance in assessments is repackaged as part of narratives of distinction

and prestige (Sidhu 2002). The future envisaged in such assessments and the practices that

ensue, then, is one of ongoing movement in rankings rather than specific teaching or

research agendas, ‘the goal is entirely relational, rather than foundational’ (Guyer 2014:

168).

Accounts of reputation and ranking in higher education tend to place emphasis on the

ways in which new orders are constituted through these technologies and practices (Alt-

bach 2012; Hazelkorn 2011; Sampson 2015). Most notably, ranking systems and their

reputational imaginaries are framed as privileging the knowledge production and dis-

semination of Anglophone universities and constituting global higher education as a

derivative of western knowledge. In this context, the push toward internationalization in

many East Asian universities, including KU and SNU, is driven by ‘‘‘global standards’’ or

‘‘international benchmarks’’ dominated by western academic paradigms’ (Mok 2007: 269).

While we agree with the general critique of rankings and reputation in these arguments, we

also seek to suggest here that some attention needs to be paid to the fissures, fractures and

failures in seeking to governmentalize universities as global institutions governed by

numbers. There is a need to recognize that ‘not all audit technologies are so powerful that

they construct new objects or reconstitute subjects’ (Sampson 2015: 82) and that in many

instances, there can be multiple audit technologies, sometimes operating in competition

with each other.

Our account captures both the normative and unpredictable dimensions of the increasing

focus on ranking and reputation. In this regard, we follow recent critiques of govern-

mentality studies that argue for greater attention to be paid to the actual subjects and spaces

through which governmental assemblages are enacted and put to work (Brady 2014). We

do this through the accounts of officials at KU and SNU who are arguably mid-players in

the emergent global governmentality of higher education, positioned between actors and

institutions who direct the hierarchical economies of reputation and the publics who

demand performance according to varying measures. This approach reveals the ‘multi-

plicity of power relations and practices within the present, as well as the actual processes

through which subjectivities’ are formed (Brady 2014: 13). Rather than simply acquiescing

to the demands of ranking, we find that officials remain sceptical about these measures and,

while this does not ordinarily alter participation, they consistently question the relationship

between reputation and quality that is established. Moreover, our account also highlights

the multi-scalar and historically situated character of reputational imaginaries and the

competing and sometimes contradictory pressures at work in the reputational practices of

institutions.

The study

This paper emerges from a project on Globalising Universities and International Student

Mobilities in East Asia (GUISM) that investigated the changing strategies of nine leading

universities in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The research was

conducted between June 2009 and December 2012, and at each university, we undertook

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interviews with officials and international students and conducted a survey of approxi-

mately 500 international students. In this paper, we draw on interviews with 10 officials at

KU and SNU (a total of 20). These interviews were conducted in English by the first author

and two other members of the research team. The interviews focused on visions and

strategies for globalization, the recruitment and management of international students,

university networks, rankings and reputation, and industry linkages. All interviews were

transcribed before being analyzed through ‘open coding’ that focused on broad issues

identified in reflections and field notes. Although the interviewees remain anonymous, we

distinguish between ‘senior officials’ with roles in university administration, ‘faculty

officials’ with strategic and operational roles and ‘managers’ involved in day-to-day

affairs.

The discussion of KU and SNU presented in this paper offers a useful window to

exploring the dynamics of ranking and reputation in contemporary higher education. Our

findings from GUISM suggest that universities in East Asia are undergoing fundamental

changes in their institutional visions, strategies and practices and their position vis-a-vis

governments, industry, national society and global competitors. In Asia, national and

private universities alike are being reimagined as global universities, charged with

recruiting top students while at the same time establishing new international research and

teaching connections (Collins and Ho 2014). This contrasts significantly with the historical

role of universities in Asia where the focus has been principally on building national

capacity and generating a national elite; today, reputation, image and influence are instead

being shaped as much by global positioning in rankings and the perceptions of interna-

tional audiences (Ishikawa 2009).

All of the universities in GUISM are actively pursuing visions of globalization, but the

ways in which these unfold differed through historical and geographical contingencies, the

involvement with state, industry and other actors, as well as sociocultural issues like

language of education (Sidhu et al. 2011). On the one hand, universities like the National

University of Singapore actively leverage its British heritage, position in Asia and

knowledge economy role (Collins et al. 2014). By contrast, others universities like Tokyo

and Osaka (or KU and SNU) negotiate global reputation and research excellence alongside

domestic competition and perception, questions around language of instruction and the

place of international students after graduation in different ways (Yeoh et al. 2014).

Despite these differences, however, we have found a pervading emphasis on the changing

dynamics of reputation, particularly that generated in international ranking, the pressure

generated by students, families, alumni, society, industry partners, government and leaders

within the institutions themselves to perform reputation in particular sorts of ways. As we

suggest in this paper, what is needed from scholars are carefully situated accounts of these

interacting forces and their significance for shaping the future of higher education.

South Korea offers an excellent site through which to explore the changing contours of

ranking and reputation in higher education. Indeed, while there is no doubt the current

global ranking craze is reshaping reputational imaginaries in South Korea, reputation and

prestige have arguably been at the heart of the wider development of higher education over

the last one and half centuries. Setting aside Confucian higher-learning institutions, the

establishment of universities began with Yonsei University in 1885 by American mis-

sionaries, KU (originally Bosung College) in 1905 by nationalistic Koreans, and SNU,

initially as Keijo Imperial University in 1924 and then the first national university in 1946.

In the 50 years following the Korean War, the number of higher education institutions

grew to some 371 including 194 universities, and the number of students increased to over

3.5 million (Lee 2004). This rapid expansion formed part of governmental projects for

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economic and social development and reflected the increasing demand for education and

social mobility in a context of rapid demographic growth.

While access to higher education has become near universal, rapid growth and uneven

investment has also worked to extend the reputational hierarchies (Lee 2004). As the main

universities through the colonial period, admission to Yonsei, KU and SNU became

increasingly competitive, and strong correlations were established between these institu-

tions, the value of knowledge production and the quality of graduates. Arguably, Confu-

cian cultural norms and their deployment in government rhetoric (Kim and Park 2003)

have also reinforced societal hierarchies, particularly in education and university entrance

(Kim 2009). These processes have contributed to the formation of rigid hierarchies of

reputation and prestige in higher education that are historically situated but continue to

have considerable significance. At the apex of educational prestige are the ‘SKY’ uni-

versities, SNU, KU and Yonsei, which represent both the oldest and most well-funded

institutions. These institutions remain highly regarded and desirable for both students and

scholars but, as we detail in the following sections, are also increasingly needing to

perform in new reputational spaces generated by rankings.

Ranking and the new geography of reputation

While the reputational hierarchies of Korean universities have been established over some

time, it is since the 1990s that notions of reputation have become associated with formal

practices of enumeration and ranking. It was in 1994 that the Joongang Media Group,

publishers of the major daily Joongang Ilbo, started carrying out its annual Korean

University Ranking (KUR) with the stated aim to ‘improve the competitiveness of Korean

universities.’ Over the following two decades, the KUR has become a significant generator

of reputation and has started to shift the emphasis from extant histories to metrics that

claim to capture performance in education, research, internationalization and social

influence. At the same time, universities have also been faced with an increasing array of

ranking metrics at other geographical scales—most notably international rankings but also

increasingly fine-tuned enumerations of regional universities, disciplines, cities and

alumni. These new geographies of ranking have intervened in established conceptions of

reputation and reworked what it means to be a prestigious university.

It would be ’96, ’97, because that was [when] we were becoming aware of the

international competition. […] The Asiaweek began doing this Asian Universities

ranking. So that also was one of the well the stimulus to the internationalisation. […]

In [the] first Asia rankings, as far as I remember, we [came] 16th in Asia, then we

thought it was not fair, because in Asia, well it was not the case. […] We became

aware of how weak we used to be or how strong we should be.

SNU Senior Official #1

As this official suggests, the establishment of new measures can engender altered

perspectives on reputation—becoming aware of ‘how weak we used to be or how strong

we should be’—and generate institutional and individual desires to alter that position.

Rankings have become a particularly important feature of institutional activity at uni-

versities like KU and SNU that have historically enjoyed elevated domestic reputations.

Long viewed as the pinnacle of national education, KU and SNU are now expected to craft

new reputational imaginaries that enhance their international status and the status of

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Korean higher education generally. This shift has occurred as universities have become

increasingly subjected to market logics, viewed as key institutions in transitions from a

manufacturing-oriented to a knowledge-based society, and as contributors to increasing

globalization of social and economic life (Byun and Kim 2010). In this context, estab-

lishing excellence has become a major site of government intervention and initiatives like

the World Class University (WCU) and Brain Korea 21 (BK21) programs have sought to

focus investment toward generating globally recognized institutions. The private sector has

also started to view universities as sites of investment and increasingly expect results that

can be measured nationally and internationally. Finally, as a number of interviewees in this

research revealed, universities are increasingly viewed as representative of the nation-state:

So in sports, they do very well, right? And like industry wise, Samsung, LG is doing

very well but the people are saying that what about the education part. I mean, you

know, universities, what we are doing in that sense, we have to show something.

SNU Faculty Official #1

Cumulatively, these imperatives and their prominence in government, institutional and

public discourses have focused the energies of universities on these metrics and their

reputational effects. Both KU and SNU have established units focused on evaluation and

ranking that include officials, academics and administrators who set strategy and imple-

ment policies to enhance performance and manage the dissemination and narration of

results. Every official interviewed in this project had something to say about ranking, goals

and strategies to improve ranking, or the effects of ranking. Their accounts point to the

ways in which ranking has acted not simply as an objective measure of the university but

rather as a calculative technology that reconstitutes reputation and reconfigures the uni-

versity in relation to other institutions and spaces.

One of the key outcomes of this focus on rankings has been the reorientation of uni-

versities around a multi-scalar geography of reputation (Jons and Hoyler 2013). Officials

emphasized the importance of international measures like QS and THES, national exer-

cises like the KUR and emerging regional measurements. These measures produce a

landscape of assessment and reputation where KU and SNU are positioned differently

against domestic rivals and across wider regional and global spaces. Officials at both

universities described pressures to maintain and respond to the constant stream of

numerical information and reputation being produced in rankings. These geographies of

reputation oscillate around three scales that demonstrate the constitutive power of national

histories, growing international networks and new measures of university performance in

establishing a scaled imaginary of university reputation.

Officials at KU emphatically highlighted that it was performance in domestic measures

that was their principle focus. Indeed, domestic reputation was viewed as a route to

international recognition: ‘domestic first, then international. But if we become domestic,

first in Korea, then automatically [we] become very good […] throughout the world’ (KU

Senior Official #2). The national space is critical for KU because its reputation in this arena

has immediate material implications for the university. A faculty official, for example,

commented on the importance of what Korean companies think:

First, domestic [reputation] is very important as engineering is about collaborating

with companies. […] I think Korea University has the best reputation in Korea.

Compared to Seoul National University, we have more collaboration with companies

as most of our students once they graduate join these companies.

KU Faculty Official #1

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Reputation built on relationships and histories can be a powerful tool for institutions,

but it can also be disrupted by new measurements. One example is the prominence of

rankings published in Korean newspapers, particularly Joongang Ilbo. Officials noted a

lack of trust in the conduct of these measures but nonetheless highlighted their importance,

not least for financial support:

Though we consistently find problems with this annual review, we monitor it because

it still has popular influence in Korea and therefore cannot be easily ignored. […] As

a private institution we receive little, if any, unrestricted government funds for

operating costs, and as a result we need to balance the budget through attracting

donations. People like to back a winner so achieving top recognition from our peers

helps us attract necessary financial support.

KU Senior Official #1

KU relies on donations from alumni or corporations to expand its activities, particularly

in research and internationalizing the campus. As universities in Korea have adjusted to the

Joonang Ilbo ranking and its measures of performance, the results have become more

mixed for SKY universities who have previously enjoyed unchallenged positions.

Universities like Sungkyunkwan, a corporate-backed private institution, have made sig-

nificant improvements in rankings, reaching third in 2013 and 2014, ahead of all three SKY

institutions. These results can affect the funding of institutions: ‘people like to back a

winner’ and one result of the growing prominence of domestic ranking is increased

pressure from alumni and other supporters to improve performance.

In contrast, officials at SNU described their position as Korea’s premier university as

incontestable. For officials, SNU’s reputation was both commonsensical and resulted in a

privileged position for the institution and its students:

I’m not from SNU so I can [say] that SNU is actually is very privileged in many

ways because SNU is [the] best university in Korea. There isn’t a doubt. If you ask

anyone in downtown Seoul or any other city in Korea, if you ask what is the best

university in Korea, absolutely they would say SNU. […] And so most leading

companies, they want to recruit SNU students because it’s guaranteed.

SNU Faculty Official #3

Nonetheless, SNU’s domestic reputation remains important. Indeed, being recognized

as the leading institution in the country—even if not in ranking terms—is critical for a

national institution that relies on increases in government funding to enhance its perfor-

mance and circulate more effectively in global higher education spaces. SNU has been the

major recipient of government funding initiatives like BK21 and WCU that monitor out-

comes in terms of research productivity and reputation internationally (Byun and Kim

2010).

While domestic reputational imaginaries are being reconfigured through new ranking

measures, it is at the regional and international scale where calculative technologies have

generated an entirely new landscape of comparison. There was only very limited regional

comparison prior to the Asiaweek rankings in the 1990s and more recently in the QS Asian

University rankings. These technologies actively constitute a space for comparison,

drawing diverse universities into a calculative regime that makes their similarities and

differences legible and then orders those institutions in terms of quality. At both KU and

SNU, this generation of an Asian geography of reputation was considered an important

point of comparison:

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I am always interested in Asia - Singapore (NUS) and Hong Kong (HKUST), both

universities are very globalised in small countries. So they study a lot about how to

survive in their situation so I think we can learn plenty.

KU Faculty Official #1

We need to […] compete with the major university […], in Asia, like Beijing,

Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, Hong Kong, those universities, maybe Hanoi. […] We’re

looking [at] them and try[ing] to chase them. […] So we are trying to get […] our

associates to chase those universities I think. That’s something [like] international

comparison.

SNU Faculty Official #4

Unlike domestic rivalries, which are shaped by personal and institutional histories

and funding implications, regional institutions were viewed as partners and models.

Officials perceived regional institutions as similarly positioned to KU and SNU, Asian

universities establishing models for competing in a global arena dominated by western

institutions and Anglophone models of education. Benchmarking between Asian insti-

tutions was common at both the university and faculty level, not least because it was in

Asia that officials identified approaches that were more applicable in the Korean

context.

International reputation is generated in more abstract terms than both domestic and

regional imaginaries. Metrics have constitutive power at this scale, where the notion of

global higher education is crafted by the comparative power of ranking. Visibility is at a

premium, movements up or down ranking lists, in and out of arbitrary markers of top 10,

30, 50 or 100 shapes wider perception of an institution. Performance in these indicators is

then bound with institutional and faculty aspirations:

Officially, we’d like to be one of the best [in the] world, best 10 universities by

2025. That’s 15 years. When we looked back what we have done 15 years up to

now, it won’t be easier than before but I don’t think that would be a huge

problem.

SNU Senior Official #1

I only have set out those numbers to faculty realistically and also the, whatever the

standard, whatever the yardstick is, we want to get into the global 50, so level up our

reputation, either by research or by the MBA reputation the ranking right, so that is

the level target. In terms of facilities, I think we are already in 50, but that is easy job

all you need is money.

KU Faculty Official #2

These expressions of aspiration for improved ranking performance demonstrate its

significance as a reputational measure. This is particularly the case at the international

scale where fewer comparative reference points exist to mark out the imaginative

dimensions of reputational difference. Clearly these rankings also orientate institutions

toward certain kinds of goals, to increase publication outputs, to garner peer recognition or

to become more internationally oriented in order to attract students and faculty. As we

suggest in the next section, then, rankings and the wider emphasis on reputation raise

questions about measurability and its influence on strategic shifts in the mission and focus

of university activities.

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Measures and measurability

The multi-scalar geography of reputation outlined above is generated in forms of enu-

meration that seek to make institutional qualities legible. Ranking, reputation and quality,

however, do not always neatly align. The increased emphasis on ranking often results in

institutional responses that do not necessarily work on ‘quality’ but rather generate what is

better understood as ‘measurability’—the capacity for an institution to be measured and

made legible to wider audiences. Alterations to university structures and practices can

produce increased visibility, but they are also limited by and can potentially undermine

wider reputation. Our research suggests that institutions like KU and SNU engage in these

practices with caution, recognizing of the force of calculative practices but also accepting

that the impacts of these measures mean that the costs of non-participation are too great.

As a calculative regime, ranking systems work primarily through visibility. This makes

rankings attractive for universities actively seeking to build on their histories as prestigious

institutions and enhance their visibility in global arenas:

Although each ranking evaluation system is different and has its own different aspect

but we think that the results show you know some, you know, status for our own

university or our college […]. This ranking system may see this part, something like

that, and overall we can analyse how we [are placed]. [The] visibility of our faculty

members, students and of our college […] is very important. So we have to put more

effort to promote what we are doing.

SNU Faculty Official #1

As a calculative technology, university rankings seek to ‘render aspects of existence

amenable to inscription and calculation’ (Miller and Rose 1990: 1). This means converting

intangible features of a ‘quality’ or ‘reputable’ institution into something that is measurable

and amenable to and standardized comparison. The result, as manifested in publications

like QS’ ‘World University Ranking,’ is a glossy presentation of ranks and narrations that

smooth over the complex functioning of institutions and the mechanisms that produce

these accounts. Our interviews suggest that rankings also hide the practical detail and

technologies involved in producing institutional difference. Officials at both institutions

commented on the difficulty of adapting to rankings, particularly when they first emerged:

It was not the ranking of university but the ranking of our answer sheet. So [ad-

ministrative staff] couldn’t understand what each item meant to be answered, so

when they asked how many books do you have, they answered just only centralised

library holdings, […] how many computers you have, they answered just computers

for administration. So that next year, when I was in charge of this ranking, we […]

found out all the resources to fill the blanks and then we became second, next to

Tokyo University.

SNU Senior Official #1

For officials, the performances demanded by rankings also highlight mismatches

between the qualities of their institution and the reputation that is produced by rankings.

Indeed, while SNU has increased considerably in its performance in international rankings,

the perception is that the specific methods of counting—the focus on the number of foreign

professors, on graduates in global employment markets, and sometimes the number of

Nobel Laureates—undermines the score that is received. Likewise, officials at KU

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expressed frustration that while university rankings produced visibility they did not work

as effective measures of university quality:

I feel that Korean universities are, […] in terms of university rankings, nowadays its

getting better, but the two things [are interconnected]. We are gaining when we go

up, having more relationships, and the other thing is the, the actual strength in terms

of research capability and quality education. I think, I personally think that Korean

universities and KU [are] better than many universities in very high ranking.

KU Senior Official #3

Rankings, in this regard, have the potential to disrupt established conceptions of quality

and reputation and reconfigure the image of universities in ways that may not always be

comfortable for these institutions. The growing emphasis on quantitative calculation shifts

the measures for achieving status and in doing so potentially reworks hierarchies that have

been historically established. An emphasis on quantitatively measurable and comparable

international ranking, for example, pays little attention to the historical reputations of KU

and SNU, although the resources established in these histories place them in a good

position to respond to shifting landscapes of reputation. While ranking may offer new

global forms of visibility, its emphasis on specific measurable markers also generates risk

in relation to historical reputation that can be challenged in the pursuit of newly mea-

surable qualities.

The measures emphasized in rankings also play a role in generating new institutional

orientations and rank-seeking behavior that actively alter the arrangement of faculty,

students, research, facilities, international networks and governance structures (Gilbert

2015). At SNU, the most notable example of this has been the institutional and government

push to become a corporatized entity. Formalized since 2012, corporatization has radically

reworked the governance structure: presidents and deans are no longer elected, faculty

recruitment and remuneration does not follow civil service procedures, and profit-seeking

activities are permitted. For many officials, this shift was explicitly framed in terms of its

potential to address ranking performance:

So until very recently, it’s a state university, we cannot have foreigners as regular

members because they have no right to be civil servant. So […] the number of

foreign faculty members from the last year is zero, but in fact we have about more

than 100 who are staff members with different, various titles like visiting professor,

adjunct professor. […] We’re now pursuing the corporatisation of the university, like

in NUS [National University of Singapore]. If it gets approved by the National

Assembly […] then we have this freedom to hire these foreigners.

SNU Senior Official #1

Corporatization alters SNU’s capacity to distinguish itself from other Korean univer-

sities and pursue national aspirations for scientific and research excellence. This radical

departure comes with considerable implications as democratic process is reduced and staff

become subject to more internationalized and relative measures of performance. At a wider

level, the mission of the university itself starts to be reconfigured, from a ‘national’

institution serving the public to a corporate entity guided principally by global

performance.

KU’s emphasis on domestic reputation has also generated rank-seeking behavior,

although as a private institution new strategies do not require governance changes. Most

notably, since 2005 KU has pursued an aggressive internationalization policy that includes

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expanding English-medium classes to around 40 %, hiring foreign faculty and recruiting

international students:

KU has tried to promote globalisation very hard and quickly became one of the

globalised universities in Korea, ahead of many other universities. […] Joongang

Ilbo also rates universities in Korea every year and globalisation is one of the four

main categories for the assessment. […] Thus, globalisation has [been] promoted by

many universities in Korea not only because of internal needs but also because of

external pressures.

KU Manager #1

Internationalization in this respect is oriented to generating visibility within the

domestic environment. The introduction of English-medium courses and growing inter-

national staff and student numbers have transformed KU’s campus in ways that have far

reaching effects not just in the reputation of the institution but also in the kind of learning

that takes place and the graduates that are produced.

Corporatization and internationalization are indicative of the new governmentalities that

emerge through the increasing emphasis on ranking and reputation in globalized higher

education. They represent techniques that reorganize universities such that different kinds

of education can take place, new bodies can circulate, and institutions have greater visi-

bility. Our interviews also demonstrated that these institution-wide strategies were

accompanied by more specific interventions that seek to rework the motivations and

practices of academics. Interviewees spoke of financial incentives for publications, new

research funds to support collaborative or innovative research, incubators for technology

commercialization, and mobility schemes for faculty and students. These policies are

accompanied by further enumerations and assessments of academic life—from the right

journals to publish in, discipline-specific publication metrics, or the right partner institu-

tions for collaboration.

Despite the pervasiveness of these new institutional settings, the growing emphasis on

ranking was also questioned by officials and others in terms of its efficacy and its effects.

Notably, officials expressed caution about rankings as measures of reputation and there

was suspicion about the motivations of the organizations producing rankings, particularly

the Joonang Ilbo assessment. For others, it was a question of trust; the assessments rely on

sometimes-questionable behavior by rivals engaged in high-stakes competition:

We don’t trust the ranking system completely. [The] ranking system asks for

information from each school but each school is not always exact and depends on

how you think and how to interpret the question e.g. on asking who is faculty

member – there is no definition. How to interpret the question. So they don’t have the

ability to [check] data from each of university. […] So we don’t trust the data very

much. The impact however is more important. Such as [with] alumni. It is the same

with international rankings.

KU Faculty Official #1

As this excerpt suggests, regardless of the efficacy of rankings as measures of reputa-

tion, these calculative technologies nonetheless have impacts that are substantial. Other

interviewees noted the ways in which the specific features of discipline-based assessments,

in this case in Business, were producing quite distinct approaches to education and learning

that were likely to have negative implications in the outlooks of future graduates:

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Some of the indicators they use, […] like salary increase before they enter MBA and

after they you know, graduate […]. That’s the most important indicator for the MBA

school. Then, we are basically nurturing greed, which is [the] main source of this

financial crisis. […] If that is the main mission of the MBA, or business school

education, then I started to wonder what am I? […] I started to wonder what my

value is to the society. […] I don’t think we should go direct, to that direction [as] a

school but Western dominated ranking systems, which is also played by a lot of

newspapers, of course they want to control [us that way].

SNU Faculty Official #5

Comments like that in the above excerpt demonstrate the pervasive way in which

universities have become entangled in the wider governmentalities of global higher edu-

cation. Rankings form a key component of this governmental assemblage, serving to

demarcate between institutions at different scales and as a result reshaping the structures

and behaviors of institutions that harbor aspirations for greater prestige. As this excerpt

suggests, such measures also have pedagogical implications and subsequently material

effects in the role of graduates in shaping societal futures.

Conclusions

The aspiration for reputation in the increasingly globalized spaces of higher education has

become one of the major driving forces for the restructuring of universities. As this paper

has demonstrated, ranking systems have become the pre-eminent measure of reputation

and in the process have reconstituted the already hierarchized landscape of higher edu-

cation in South Korea such that visibility is at a premium and institutions engage in

speculative behavior in pursuit of sometimes pyrrhic victories.

As the account presented here has demonstrated, KU and SNU have had to navigate a

careful dance through this new world of reputation and enumeration. They encounter a

multi-scalar and always shifting geography of reputation where improvements in one

measurement can undermine success in others. Both KU and SNU carry histories of

significant national prestige but are also increasingly expected by government, their fun-

ders, business or the wider Korean public to perform in a range of measures of university

performance. This pressure has generated rank-seeking behaviors that are having profound

impacts on the structure and orientation of these universities and higher education in Korea

more broadly. Indeed, the corporatization of SNU and the internationalization of KU alter

significantly the mission of these institutions, not only making the differences between

them more apparent but altering their relationship to other universities in Korea and to the

Korean nation. While for some scholars like Marginson (2007: 139) this is evidence of

‘reputation for its own sake,’ we would argue that these institutions are actively, perhaps

even rationally, responding to pressures from government, society and key actors involved

in maintaining the institution. As we have shown, reputational performance is not an end in

itself, but rather serves to shore up funding from alumni and donors or to maintain the

willingness of government and society to continue to fund universities to become global

leaders.

Through this analysis, our paper makes two interventions in the way in which rankings

and reputation are understood as forces in contemporary higher education. Firstly, this is a

critique of the high-level metrics deployed in rankings and their attempt to capture the

‘qualities’ of institutions. As we have demonstrated, in seeking to measure universities in a

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transnational field of equivalence that involves huge differences and uncertainties, these

calculative technologies always run up against questions of measurability—the capacity to

make legible the qualities of different institutions. Our account has highlighted that offi-

cials participate in ranking less because they believe that they are accurate measures of

quality or that they will demonstrably improve the institution but rather because they offer

opportunities for increased visibility, particularly beyond the national scale. As a result,

individual and institutional behavior is often actively reconfigured to achieve greater

visibility in these rankings. The resulting mutations of institutional form and practice

restructure institutions and can alter the purpose and mission of universities in ways that

have unpredictable outcomes.

Secondly, our paper has also offered a critique of those literatures on ranking and

reputation that read a direct line of causality from the increased emphasis on ranking to a

more globalized and neoliberalized institution (Altbach 2012; Hazelkorn 2011). Certainly,

international rankings are playing a significant role in reconfiguring notions of reputation

and subsequent behaviors in universities like KU and SNU. Yet, the accounts of officials at

these universities demonstrate that the push to international rankings does not necessarily

completely rescript the reputations of universities. Rather, international rankings and

reputation must be examined in terms of their interaction with domestic historically

generated notions of reputation, and in particular the rigidity of national hierarchies and the

importance of domestic rank for students, alumni and both public and private funding.

Indeed, the relatively long histories and established position in domestic symbolic and

funding hierarchies of KU and SNU give them enviable resources to consolidate positions

in the multi-scalar reconfiguration of reputation discussed here. Nonetheless, our discus-

sions show that institutions like these have to navigate a complex terrain of multi-scalar

and always mutating forms of reputation, to remain abreast of the needs and expectations

of multiple publics and to manage with care the disruptions brought about by the glob-

alization of higher education. This cautionary tale highlights the importance of scholars

paying careful attention to the unfolding of new technologies in higher education, their

achievements and their failures, and the always-unexpected implications for the future of

higher education.

Acknowledgments The research discussed here comes from the Globalising Universities and Interna-tional Student Mobilities in East Asia project funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 Grantscheme (Number: MOE20089-T2-1-101, Principal Investigator: Assoc-Prof Ho Kong Chong, NationalUniversity of Singapore). The Korea Foundation provided support for manuscript writing within a FieldResearch Fellowship for Francis Collins. The constructive reviews of two anonymous referees have beenhelpful in refining the arguments developed in this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

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