ANU Back on Top

It's official: After slipping a few notches in its global rankings last year, ANU has returned to its spot as the world's sixteenth-best university according to London's Times Higher Education Supplement. This is not bad for a small Australian university--especially considering that the top fifteen places are taken by institutions such as Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, Yale and the like. ANU is ranked just below Cornell and many notches above my old alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (no. 79).

The crazy thing is that very few Australians get just how good ANU is. This year, we launched a new consortium under our leadership--the International Association of Research Universities--which teams ANU in research and academic endeavours with Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Berkeley, Tokyo, Beijing, National University of Singapore, the University of Copenhagen, and ZTH Zurich. At the same time, we had to lower our entrance cut-offs for domestic students to try to encourage more Aussies to enrol here. That's nuts.

I blame this at least partially on a lingering influence from Marxism in Australian higher education. Many in the sector don't want various universities to been seen as better than others because that would introduce 'inequity' into the system. I'm not just making this up, either. Earlier this year, the university started talking about introducting oral defences for PhD theses, and, as a student rep, I actually met with students who didn't want this to happen--not because they were afraid of oral examinations but, by their own admission, because this would make an ANU degree 'distinctive.'

Frankly, I feel blessed to be at one of the world's best universities. I walk through the corridors of my building, and I'm amazed at the concentration of expertise in all things Asia-Pacific that I have access to. And I'm happy that, when I finish my PhD next year, I'll carry for the rest of my life a 'distinctive' degree.