A university improves its research output, increases its citations, develops new international partnerships and strengthens its academic reputation. Its leaders might reasonably expect these achievements to result in a higher position in the university rankings.
When the next ranking is published, the university may not have moved. It may even have dropped.
It would be easy to regard this as a failure. Perhaps the investment was insufficient, the strategy was ineffective or the institution did not improve quickly enough. But there is another possibility: the university did improve, perhaps substantially, but its competitors improved at a similar, or better, rate.
The institution has been running fast, but so has everyone else.
This is an example of the Red Queen Effect. The name comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass[1], in which the Red Queen tells Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”. This idea has been applied to organisations competing against one another. When one organisation improves, its competitors respond, creating a cycle in which everyone must continue investing simply to maintain their relative position. It could be argued that the sector as a whole is improving, but it may not feel that way to individual institutions.
University rankings provide an almost perfect example of this.
Rankings measure relative position
University leaders often talk about rankings as though they are examinations. Improve the quality of the institution, achieve a higher score and move up the table. But rankings are not examinations with fixed grade boundaries. They are competitions in which the performance of every other participant affects the outcome.
A university that wants to enter the “top 500” is not trying to cross a stationary threshold. It is trying to overtake institutions that are also investing, recruiting, publishing, collaborating and changing their strategies.
This distinction matters because absolute improvement and relative position are not the same thing. An institution may increase its research output by 10%, but fall in the rankings if comparable universities increase by 15%. Another institution may improve only modestly but rise because several competitors perform less well.
Movement in a ranking can tell us something useful about relative position, but it does not provide a complete account of institutional progress. Remaining in the same position does not necessarily mean that nothing has changed. Equally, moving upwards does not automatically mean that the university has improved in every indicator.
Governing bodies and university leaders should be careful not to confuse their ranking position with their absolute performance. It’s all relative.
When everyone responds
The Red Queen Effect becomes particularly powerful when universities respond to the same incentives. One institution introduces incentives for publication in highly cited journals. Others follow. A university expands its international partnerships, so its competitors increase theirs. Institutions invest in reputation campaigns, recruit highly cited researchers, pursue international students and improve the collection of ranking data. Each action may be rational when considered from the perspective of an individual university.
Collectively, however, these decisions can create an expensive cycle. Universities commit more money, staff time and leadership attention to ranking-related activity, while the overall distribution of positions changes surprisingly little.
There can also be a ratchet effect. Once competitors have increased their investment, reducing your own commitment may become difficult. What began as an attempt to climb the rankings can become a defensive effort to avoid falling. An institution may no longer be investing because it expects to advance, but because it fears what will happen if it stops.
That is a very different strategic proposition, and it should be recognised as such.
Is standing still sometimes an achievement?
University strategies often set ranking targets without acknowledging the Red Queen Effect. A plan may state that the institution will rise by a certain number of places over five years, supported by targets for publications, citations, international recruitment and reputation.
What may be missing is any serious analysis of how quickly competing institutions are likely to improve during the same period.
If the university achieves all its internal targets but remains in the same ranking position, was the strategy unsuccessful? The answer depends on what those improvements produced. If they strengthened research quality, created valuable partnerships, improved student opportunities and increased the institution’s contribution to society, then describing the outcome as a failure would be difficult to justify.
Indeed, maintaining a ranking position in an increasingly competitive environment may represent a significant achievement. The institution may have had to improve simply to remain where it was. Would stating that maintaining its position is one of the university’s objectives be wrong, or could it appear unambitious?
This does not mean that leaders should celebrate every unchanged position or use external competition to excuse poor performance. It means that ranking outcomes must be interpreted properly. A number in a league table should be considered alongside the institution’s underlying performance, the movement of its competitors and the resources used to achieve the result.
Without that wider context, ranking discussions can become both simplistic and misleading.
Does the running improve the university?
The Red Queen Effect does not imply that investment connected with rankings is necessarily wasteful. Many activities that support ranking performance may also strengthen the university, even if it does not move it in the rankings.
Better research support can help academics produce stronger work. Improved institutional data can support better decisions. International collaboration can create opportunities for staff and students. Greater visibility can attract partners, applicants and talented colleagues.
The difficulty arises when universities select activities mainly because they are expected to influence ranking indicators, rather than because they advance the institution’s purpose.
This can gradually distort priorities. Research areas that attract citations may receive more attention than work of local importance. International activity may be valued for the numbers it produces rather than the quality of the relationships created. Communications teams may focus on reputation surveys while less visible institutional problems remain unresolved.
Even worthwhile activity can become questionable if the cost is disproportionate to the benefit. A university may improve an indicator, but leaders still need to ask what else could have been achieved with the same money, time and attention.
Running faster is not a strategy unless the institution has decided why it is running.
Can a university choose a different race?
Ignoring rankings completely may be an attractive suggestion, but it is not always realistic. Rankings can influence institutional reputation, student recruitment, international partnerships, staff confidence and government policy. In some settings, a significant fall may have consequences that extend well beyond the ranking itself.
But accepting that rankings matter does not require every university to compete in the same way.
A research-intensive university with a global mission may reasonably prioritise indicators connected with publications, citations and international reputation. A regional, teaching-focused or open university may have a very different purpose. If it attempts to imitate the strategies of institutions with different missions, resources and student populations, it may weaken the qualities that make it distinctive.
The strategic question is therefore not simply, “How do we improve our ranking?” It is, “Which forms of performance matter to this university, and how much attention should we give to their representation in rankings?”
That distinction allows an institution to engage with rankings without allowing the rankings to define it. Some competition may be necessary. Some investment may be defensive. But neither should be allowed to consume resources without an explicit discussion of institutional value.
Three types of ranking activity
One way of bringing greater discipline to these decisions is to distinguish among three broad types of activity.
- Improvements that advance the university’s mission and may also improve its ranking. These are usually the easiest to justify because the institution benefits even if its ranking position does not change.
- Defensive investments needed to maintain visibility or avoid a damaging decline. Such spending may sometimes be necessary, but leaders should describe it honestly. A defensive investment should not automatically be presented as institutional improvement.
- Activity undertaken primarily to influence a ranking indicator, with limited evidence that it creates wider value. This is where the strongest challenge is required. If the main justification for an initiative is that competitors are doing it, the university may be allowing the race to determine its strategy.
These categories will not always be clear-cut. The same initiative may contain elements of all three. But making the distinction encourages a more mature conversation about purpose, cost and expected benefit.
Reporting progress more honestly
The Red Queen Effect also has implications for how university performance is reported.
Governing bodies should receive more than the latest ranking position and an arrow showing whether it has moved up or down. They should also be shown changes in the underlying indicators, progress against institutional priorities, relevant movements among comparable universities and the resources devoted to ranking-related activity.
This would make it possible to separate several different stories that an unchanged position might conceal. The university may have improved while competitors improved equally quickly. It may have made little progress while others also stood still. Or it may have improved in areas that matter to its mission but are poorly represented by the ranking methodology.
Those are very different outcomes, even if the number beside the university’s name remains unchanged.
Leaders should also be cautious about taking excessive credit for a rise or accepting excessive blame for a fall. Ranking movements may reflect changes in methodology, data submitted by other institutions or shifts in the wider system. Leadership decisions matter, but they are only part of the explanation.
Knowing why we are running
The Red Queen Effect helps explain why ranking strategies can become increasingly demanding without producing the movement that university leaders expect. It also exposes a weakness in targets that focus on position without considering competitors, cost or institutional purpose.
Universities cannot assume that standing still means they have failed. Nor can they assume that running faster is always worthwhile.
The challenge is to identify which improvements would be valuable even if the ranking did not exist, which investments are genuinely necessary to remain competitive and which activities are being pursued mainly because everyone else is pursuing them.
A university may have to run simply to maintain its position. But its leaders should still know whether they are running towards something that matters, or merely running because everyone around them is doing the same.
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About the Author
Graham Kendall is Vice-Chancellor of GlobalNxt University in Malaysia and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham. He has held senior leadership positions in higher education in the UK and Malaysia, including Provost, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and writes regularly about university leadership, research, academic publishing and higher education policy.
[1] Carroll, L. (1871). Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan