Focus on university ranking
How do the foregoing reflections relate to university  rankings. very much in vogue at present?
Van Vught & Ziegele have proposed to construct a U-Map and a Multi-Rank:
U-Map is a European classification of Higher Education Institutions, designed to map the diversity of European universities
U-Multirank is designed to produce an international ranking of university performance, in dimensions analogous to those used to map diversity

A multivariate analysis could be used to check on the proposed dimensions: education profile, student profile, research involvement, knowledge exchange, international orientation, regional engagement. In a article on the innovative university I have listed three core missions: teaching, research, contributing to innovation plus 'something else'. The latter refers to the role of the university as a transmitter of culture, having wider social and cultural responsibilities or even being a 'finishing school' (Drewe, 2010). How to capture these less tangible aspects?

Still being at the feasibility stage, Van Vught's & Ziegele's project has already met with massive criticism from LERU, the League of European Research Universities (see ). According to this lobby of three Dutch and two English universities, the risk of the project is 'the potential for game playing when reputations for excellence are at stake'. Excellence, which reads competition, is the very essence of ranking. Who wants to be a loser when priority funding, attractiveness for foreign students and researchers or lucrative research contracts with the private sectors are at stake? If excellence entails specialization, one might oppose the underlying philosophy of the survival of the fittest to 'the survival of the least specialized' (Ruffié). Diversity is a different matter. It coulkd lead to the identification of different degree of fitness, albeit this may contradict European policy: some find that the top-down Bologna process embraces the stance that 'One size fits all'.