Michelle Stack (Ed.), Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge, University of Toronto, 2021, 262 pp., ISBN 9781487530402

With the entrenched neoliberal ideology in the globalized higher education (HE) contexts, the explosion and popularity of global university rankings (GURs) demonstrate that we now live in a neoliberal, ranked, and compared global era. Michelle Stack’s edited book Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge directs our attention to the geopolitical power of GURs in constructing and reproducing the epistemic privilege of top-ranked institutions in the Global North yet continuingly marginalizing the knowledge of the Global South. The authors in this edited book point to the need for an understanding of rankings in different social and cultural contexts and unpack how geopolitical power is entangled with GURs in reinforcing top-ranked Global North higher education institutions (HEIs) as the normative and desirable model of global HE. The book categorizes three main themes that coherently unpack the critical issues regarding rankings. The first theme, “Geopolitics, Rankings, and Journal Impact Factors,” highlights the interplay between GURs, government rankings, regional geopolitics, and media. In Chapter 1, Lloyd and Ordorika discuss how GURs influence government and institutional policies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America and reinforce the symbolic violence and cultural hegemony of the Global North, amplifying inequity and exclusion in the Global South. In Chapter 2, Sá et al. examine and compare the emergence of national university rankings in three regions, Central Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America and find that the idea of rankings is disseminated under the privatization of national HE through both formal national rankings and policy tools that generate rank-able data on universities for quality assurance, government control, and accountability. In Chapter 3, Shahjahan et al. compare two ranking websites and find that Global North countries and HEIs were visually promoted as the most desirable. The second theme, “Costs of Knowledge, Rankings, and Journal Impact Factors,” illustrates how GURs purport to offer a measure of research productivity and how the business of rankings and journal impact factors are connected and impact our decisions on education and research. In Chapter 4, Chou’s study discusses how rankings reinforce the “SSCI-focused mentality” (p. 105) among Taiwanese academia that privileges fast scholarship and English language in publishing journal articles. In Chapter 5, Morrison provides an overview of the rapid implementation of diverse metrics-based approaches among rankings and journal impacts. She argues that the forms of metrics-based assessment of research and researcher are an “irrational rationality” (p. 124) that are not compatible with the goal of producing and disseminating quality research. Chapter 6 by Claire explores how the ranking indexes make it difficult for a university in the Global South to gain traction and improve its position in the rankings. He argues that the self-referential and mutually reinforcing nature of the ranking metrics continues to privilege the Anglosphere and further marginalize the already marginalized. The final theme, “Influence of Rankings on Institutional and Individual Well-Being,” discusses the need to understand how rankings are considered normative and credible by stakeholders and their social networks and how ranking impacts individuals from a sociophycological perspective. In Chapter 7, Ishikawa argues that GUR is not compatible in the Japanese context; thus, replacing the national system of prestige with global ranking may have significant impacts on the well-being of individuals beyond institutional and national policy aspirations and competitions. In Chapter 8, Barron argues that GURs represent a “global surveillance assemblage” (p. 175) and all stakeholders are actors at play. Any consideration of alternative for resisting the power of rankings needs to be considered within such a global ranking assemblage. In Chapter 9, Hall unpacks the impact of rankings on the mental health of faculty members and graduate …