Competition metaphors abound in higher education.  We talk about competition for students, competition for academics.  Since the introduction of rankings – particularly the global ones about fifteen years ago – we talk about “moving up the tables”, in a squash-ladder kind of way.

(There are some sumo metaphors with which I could regale you here but using my incredible powers of self-control, I will spare you, even though the Kyushu basho is currently bumming me out, what with all the top dudes getting injured and going kyujo and Nishikigi cratering so badly.  At least Enho is still awesome).

And yet, competition at some level implies change.  No one remembers US Leather, the Laclede Gas Company, Distilling & Cattle Feeding Company or the American Cotton Oil Company, but in 1896 they were such corporate colossi that they were all founding members of the Dow Jones Industrial Index.  But in higher education you don’t see anything like this.  For the most part, the institutions that were considered the best in 1896 are still the best in their respective countries. 

If there had been such a thing as rankings in 1900, you can be pretty sure that in Canada Toronto and McGill would have been 1-2.  There actually were rankings in the US in 1900, and they included Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Chicago.  In the UK, Oxford and Cambridge were as clearly 1-2 as they are today; the same is true of Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Todai in Japan, Universidad de Chile…I could go on, but you get the idea.  It’s not that there have been no changes in the higher education pecking order over a century or so.  The emergence of powerful universities on the Pacific Coast of North America has certainly been important and the rise of Chinese universities and the National University of Singapore are significant in a global sense.  But within any given country, there are almost no good examples of a “top” university from a century ago (or 50 years ago, say, in countries like China where the history of universities does not extend back to 1900) being knocked off its perch.  Those who started on top stay on top.  They are, if you will, academic hegemons.

If this is competition, it is of a very particular nature.

Part of the difference of course, is the fact that “competition” and “markets” are – contrary to what some people would have you believe – not co-equal.  Indeed, competition within institutions – for awards, research grants, etc., pre-dates “neo-liberalism” and in some ways might even have been the model for it.  In markets, there are multiple ways to win.  You can win on price, or on quality, or (less frequently) a mix of the two.  You can build niches or sub-niches.  Whole industries can grow and contract and companies along with them: sometimes companies can even switch industries (see Nokia and IBM). 

With higher education institutions, on the other hand, there is only one way to the “top”: prestige.  And prestige is built almost exclusively on research activities, which by nature is expensive.  The only way to win is to be luxe, high-performance, and damn the cost.  Imagine the computer industry or the automobile industry if no one had been able to try to compete on cost.  That’s basically higher education.  (It’s also why talk of “disrupting” higher education is such nonsense – you can’t disrupt an industry where price – or in any case expenditures – is considered a mark of quality).

And it’s a vicious circle: prestige means you get the best students, which means you get the best professors (they prefer the more motivated students, particularly at the graduate level).  The best professors in turn mean not just more publications and more research dollars, but also being closer to the centre of a greater number of scholarly networks, which means graduate students at those institutions can launch more easily into both academic and non-academic careers.  Easier launches means higher career trajectories for alumni, and closer access to power centres (both government and corporate), which in turn means that when power wants something from higher education, they turn specifically to those institutions, which reinforces their prestige, which makes it easier to get the best students….and the cycle continues.

It’s not impossible to break this cycle, but it’s very, very hard, and when you see changes in the pecking order it’s usually because a top institution screwed up and not because a lower-ranked institution suddenly did better.  Clark University, for instance, was considered top ten in 1900 but certainly isn’t today.  A very few institutions get big by nudging the definition of quality and prestige away from its traditional pure research moorings: MIT, for example, or Waterloo. 

In some ways, it would be great if higher education were more like other markets.  It would probably do academia good to see some academic hegemons get into trouble once in awhile.  But structurally speaking that’s nearly impossible: hegemons gonna hegemon.  The rest of us can “compete” all they like, and it might even do some good.  But change who’s at the top?  Nah.

(Kind of like in sumo.  Gotcha.)