Political interference, budgetary restrictions, militant actions: academic freedom is in danger in a growing number of countries, which are now part of the United States, under the presidency of Donald Trump. No classification of universities, however, considered it useful to measure the degree of freedom of teaching and research, underlines Stéphanie Balme, director of the International Research Center, at Sciences Po. On the occasion of the publication of the 2025 edition of the Shanghai ranking, Friday, August 15, she urges Europe to Europe “Affirm your priorities” By promoting the values of a humanist science, academic freedom and interdisciplinarity.
When the Shanghai ranking appeared, you were lying your research in China. What did you perceive at the time?
In 2006, I was on a mission at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and in the office where what was going to become the famous Chinese and world classification of universities was born. I was trying to analyze China’s scientific strategy behind this tool and, incidentally, why Sciences Po did not appear there … We were struck by the contrast between the discretion of this university, founded at the end of the 19th centurye century and then unknown internationally, and its ambition to classify all the others, including members of the American Ivy League [telles Harvard ou Yale]according to purely quantitative criteria [nombre de publications dans de grandes revues scientifiques, nombre de chercheurs…]modeled on US standards. The international academic world could have ignored this ranking. On the contrary, he influenced the strategies of establishments. I remember having then had the feeling of attending a major transformation of which little, at the time, still measured the magnitude.
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