I was in Brussels last week and while wandering around town, I couldn’t help notice the cover of this week’s issue of Le Figaro, which was a ranking of top foreign universities.

So far as I know, this is something new. National magazines tend to do national rankings. Occasionally, a paper with pretentions to an international scope (like the Times Higher) does an international ranking. But a ranking by a national magazine that focuses entirely on foreign institutions? Intrigued, I picked up a copy.

Now, Le Figaro has an editorial interest in playing up the French brain drain – they’ve been saying for years that France is going down the toilet and that the best and the brightest are leaving (coincidentally, this week’s cover story in The Economist is about France, and is entitled “The Time Bomb at the Heart of Europe”). They haven’t been overly keen on French universities over the years, either. So the whole special edition, which was published under the headline “Partir pour réussir” (leave to succeed), can be seen as part of a general campaign to encourage France and its institutions to change and be more internationally competitive.

As it happens, there’s nothing particularly exciting in these rankings. Methodologically, they’re a dog’s breakfast: for arts/social science, science and engineering, all they’ve done is steal data from two of indicators in the THE rankings and re-weighted them; for business, they’ve just combined data from business rankings produced by the Financial Times, The Economist, Businessweek, Forbes and U.S. News and World Report. As you might expect from that, the top institutions are the usual suspects and the only Canadian institutions that get a look-in are UBC, McGill and Toronto.

But the thought that struck me most forcefully was upon seeing it was: man, you’d never see that in Canada. I mean, evenMaclean’s – which spent nearly the entire Chrétien-Martin years moaning about Canadian mediocrity – never thought to do anything with its university issues but bang out the same old copy about the same old 50 Canadian schools. Even if we didn’t use quite so offensive a phrase as “leaving to succeed,” just the idea of encouraging our students to study abroad would be abhorrent here. Hell, in some parts of the country, high school kids regularly get brainwashed into believing that leaving the province is some kind of act of disloyalty (yes, I’m looking at you, Newfoundland).

Of course, in our advanced state of cognitive dissonance on the whole international education thing, we see no conflict between our failure to encourage our students to go abroad and our view of ourselves as a really international society. And it goes without saying that the World Always Needs More Canada.

Sigh.