campusreview.com.au
National happiness scale
Eight Australian universities to trial rankings alternative.
T
he tiny, landlocked eastern Himalayan nation of Bhutan
measures its success not by wealth – but by happiness.
This is no mere slogan; it evaluates the feeling annually
using a Gross National Happiness (GNH) scale, according to the
terms of its 2008 constitution.
The scale is grounded on social equity, environmental protection,
cultural preservation and good governance. ‘Community vitality’ is
a GNH sub-clause.
“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National
Product,” said Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the king of Bhutan from
1972 to 2006.
Australian unis climb
world subject ranking
How Australian university subjects fared against the world.
T
he University of Melbourne and Australian National
University have continued to perform well in an
international subject ranking.
Overall, 11 Times Higher Education World University Rankings
subject tables were published over four dates.
UniMelb was ranked first in Australia in three of the first four
subject rankings, released in October. They were business and
economics, education and law.
news
The UN has urged other countries to follow suit. While they
haven’t holistically, some universities have – in the community
vitality sense. The Carnegie Classification, established in the US in
1973, monitors diversity in colleges. The Community Engagement
Classification, an optional sub-classification launched in 2005,
has now been embraced in Australia.
Led by UTS and CSU – ACU, CQU, Curtin, Flinders, SCU and
USC will also join a pilot of the classification, defined as the
collaboration between institutions of higher education and their
larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the
mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a
context of partnership and reciprocity.
Indices include community relations (outreach and
partnerships), infrastructure, funding and fundraising, alignment
and community engagement training for staff for teaching
and research.
The Swearer Center at Brown University – a private Ivy League
institution in Providence, Rhode Island – now administers the
classification. Delegates from the eight Australian universities
went there in August to learn about it and consider how to adapt
it to an Australian context.
“This international pilot project will enable us to develop
partnerships and learning communities where we will exchange
research, data and best practices with partners around the world,”
the centre’s executive director, Mathew Johnson, said at the time.
Australia isn’t the first non-US country to trial the classification:
universities in Ireland have already done so, and Canadian ones
are part-way through. Worldwide, 361 institutions are currently
Carnegie Community Engaged Campuses. ■
And now that all subject tables have been released, it can add
computer science, life sciences, psychology, and clinical, pre-
clinical and health to its list of number ones.
The last of the first four subject rankings released, social sciences,
saw ANU take out the top spot among the nation’s institutions.
ANU can now also claim itself as Australia’s top performing
university in the subjects of arts and humanities, and physical
sciences.
Besides ANU, Monash University was the only Australian offering
to take out UniMelb, coming in at equal 63rd on the engineering
and technology table.
Overall, Australia’s best posting was in the subject of clinical,
pre-clinical and health – UniMelb snagged equal 9th with Colombia
University. It also managed to grab a top 10 spot on the law table.
Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge ranked ahead of it on
both tables.
Stanford and Oxford each topped the tables for four subjects,
leaving only three for Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology to take out.
Other Australian institutions celebrated moves up the subject
ladders. The University of Wollongong was pleased to see it had
climbed to 87th in the world in engineering and technology, up
from 96th last year and into the top 201–250 band for computer
science, up from 250–300 last year.
Meanwhile, Swinburne University debuted in five new subjects in
the ranking scheme, taking its overall total to nine.
The subject rankings are based on the same range of 13
performance indicators used in the overall world university
ranking. ■
5