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Martedì 5 giugno 2018, ore 10

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Aula Pagani

Segnaliamo, a nome di Juan Carlos De Martin (Politecnico di Milano), il libro “Weapon of Mass Destruction” di Cathy O’Neill, con particolare attenzione per il terzo capitolo “Arms race going to college”.

University rankings are public measures that are intended to express the quality of universities as a specific number on a shared metric. This commensuration of quality produces evaluations that are precise, relative and, in the language of methodology, highly reactive: they initiate changes, sometimes dramatic ones, in the behavior of the organizations they are designed to measure. Rankings create for each university a specific relationship to every other university such that the ascent of one usually requires the descent of others. Rankings make obvious a university’s standing and trajectory with numbers that circulate easily, are enveloped in the authority of science, and seem easy to interpret. Rankings offer a new form of scrutiny, one easily accessible to outsiders. As highly visible symbols of quality, rankings have changed, in many places, how educators make decisions, allocate resources, and think about themselves and others. My lecture will examine three important kinds of effects that rankings have had: They create a new status system which envelops universities; they change relations of authority within and among universities; and they change how resources and opportunities are distributed. Rankings, like other forms of quantification, are interventions as much as they are representations and we need to investigate their social and ethical implications.

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Giornata di studi in onore di Carlo Donolo: giovedì 10 maggio 2018, presso la Fondazione Feltrinelli, Sala Polifunzionale (ore 9:30-16:00)

Consultate il programma della giornata cliccando qui.

Letture:

Potete trovare un resoconto della giornata nel contributo di Lorenzo De Vidovich: clicca qui.