I just posted a item urging The University of Western Ontario to fire it's prez, Amit Chakma, and to get back to striving for excellence instead of incompetence. Clearly the Board of Governors must go as well.
Here is why: They renewed his contract for another five years despite a record of incompetence. From the London Free Press:
When Chakma came to Western, he promised to boost its international standing and pointed to annual rankings done by The Times of London in England.
At the time, he thought the school was well positioned to break into the top 100.
“As a first step, it would be wonderful to be among the top 100 universities that The Times of London (lists). Western is very close,” he said in 2009.
But Western has since fallen in the rankings to between 225 and 250. Those behind the ranking don’t disclose the exact placement of schools not in the top 200.
Another ranking publication that splintered off the Times ranking had Western sinking to 199 and 191 the past two years.
Even the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western slipped badly: It ranked as high as 27th in 2007, ranked in the 40s the following four years, and this year dropped to 97th, hanging by a thread to a top 100 ranking.
A university spokesperson defended the school’s standing, writing that Western ranked in the top five in Canada and top 150 globally in philosophy, psychology, economics and accounting and finance.
“As for Ivey, all Canadian business schools are seeing a downturn in global rankings . . . That said, the most notable, recent business school ranking for Ivey comes from Bloomberg Businessweek, (which) ranked Ivey as the No.1 business school for MBAs outside of the United States,” spokesperson Keith Marnoch wrote.
Note: in the 1980s, when Stan Liebowitz and I did some serious ranking of economics departments, the UWO economics department ranked somewhere between 7th and 30th in the world, depending on the criteria used. [see this: "Assessing Assessments of Economics Departments" (with S. Liebowitz), Quarterly Review of Economics and Business 28 (Summer 1988): 88-113.]
The department is now in the top 150??? Sheesh. Not all the decline is due to Chakma, for sure. But being one of the top 200 economics departments claiming to be in the top 150 is nowhere near being one of the top 30 claiming to be in the top 20.