Do Books Have a Place in a Shanghai World?

Abstract

For those who haven’t yet noticed, there’s a tune everyone’s whistling nowadays, and it’s the tune of rankings and evaluations. We’re evaluating a lot of things, from hospitals to the work of ministries themselves, but from now on it’s the evaluation of universities and of higher education in general that will attract the most attention. And, evaluated in this manner, universities begin to regain their prestige, at long last—not once again—since these rankings and evaluations do not correspond (quite the opposite, in fact) to the glorious image that the French, it seems, would like to have of themselves. No problem! To these rankings (a new genre of human-interest story, quite useful for fi lling dead space in newspapers), our managers respond with a new battery of assessments, and everybody seems satisfi ed. Everybody but us, the assessed, such tragic fi gures—and much more tragic are those among the assessed who happen to belong to the diffi cult-to-assess discipline of literary studies.1 No matter how much each of us, according to his or her personal tastes, may jeer at, revolt against, or methodically deconstruct academic rankings (chief among them being the Shanghai ranking), our work becomes more and more infl uenced