Art History Productivity Index: Rankled by Another University Ranking

As if the U.S. News & World Report college rankings weren't bad enough, now we've got the Chronicle of Higher Education's 2007 Art History and Criticism Productivity Index [via Art History Newsletter]. The index "compiles overall institutional rankings on 375 universities that offer the Ph.D. degree." (I'll give you one guess as to which school is Number One.)

Yardsticks for "faculty productivity" include: number of books published; journal publications; citations of journal articles; federal grant dollars awarded; honors and awards. Quality of teaching and student outcome apparently don't count.

The University of Pennsylvania should get a special citation, though, for appearing in the top 10 twice (at 3 and 10), because "the [art history and criticism] discipline is related to more than one department."

The wonks at the Chronicle really ought to correct their link to "Academic Analytics" in the next-to-last paragraph, which supposedly gives us a closer look at their number-crunching proclivities. The website with the saucy-looking young lady and the link to "Need Cash? Click Here for Fast Cash" can't possibly be where the high-minded Chroniclers intended us to venture. They should have linked to academicanalytics.com (but didn't). [UPDATE: They have now fixed their link.]

By the time you read this, they may have rectified this error. If not, I'm NOT recommending that you click on the .org link, as I did, since that site looks very dicey (and has incorporated a link calculated to entice those muddled scholars who arrive there for statistical enlightment). Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I felt like my computer was slowing down until I closed down that phishy-looking site. Let's hope my antivirus and firewall were working.

Kinda sours you on this whole rank enterprise, doesn't it? Veritas Shmeritas. (Oh wait, my Dad went there.)