A note on a very early academic quality ranking by James McKeen Cattell
✍ Scribed by David S. Webster
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1984
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 224 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Academic quality rankings are efforts to rank order colleges and universities or their individual departments in order of their presumed quality, based upon one or more criteria. The earliest such ranking is generally believed to have been published by Raymond M. Hughes in 1925. In actuality, however, the eminent psychologist James McKeen Cattell published one as early as 1910. He did so because he wanted to show the institutions where leading American scientists currently worked and to demonstrate that his home institution, Columbia University, had recently declined in scientific strength. This brief article has two purposes. The first is to show that James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944), the eminent early psychologist, founding editor of American Men of Science, and long-time editor of several important scientific journals, realized still another achievement that has been overlooked all these years. In 1910 he published, in the pages of Science, an academic quality ranking fifteen years before the publication of what is generally considered to be the first such ranking.' The second is to show what led him to produce this ranking.
Academic quality rankings are efforts to list colleges and universities-or, much more commonly, their individual departments-in order of their presumed quality, based on one or more criteria. Some frequently used criteria are the eminence of their faculty, based upon their publications, awards, honors, and citations, and the accomplishments of their students in later life, based upon their occupations or listings in publications like Who's Who in America.