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This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speaker: Dr Michelle Stack (University of British Columbia)

A world beyond rankings? Looking to the Cooperative Movement for Alternative Models of Governance for Higher Education

The role of academia as a defence against misinformation and a catalyst for research-informed practice, public debate and policy is crucial; however, there is a chasm in connecting scholarly-informed approaches to grappling with pressing global challenges. This talk is divided into two main parts.

The initial part examines the challenges universities face in expanding public discourse and shaping policies when metrics for a successful university are based on media-driven rankings.

The second part presents case studies of cooperative educational institutions and cooperative services at universities (e.g., housing). These will be discussed as viable alternatives to the traditional, ranking-focused methods of evaluating the performance of educational institutions and systems. This segment highlights how cooperative approaches to governance offer different approaches to accountability in higher education, emphasizing collaboration and community engagement over competitive rankings.

Michelle Stack, Ph.D., is the Academic Director of the Learning Exchange for the University of British Columbia and an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies. Her central research interest concerns how people, knowledge and institutions are categorized and the influence of these categorizations on our collective ability to respond to growing inequity. Her current work focuses on cooperative colleges and universities as a way to provide learning opportunities for democratic decision-making while also increasing food, job, and housing security for students and staff. 

She is the author of Global University Ranking and the Mediatization of Higher Education (Palgrave), editor of  Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge (Open Access Book, University of Toronto), and “Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: University Rankings or Co-operatives as a Strategy for Developing an Equitable and Resilient Post-Secondary Education Sector?” (International Review of Education) . 

Dr Stack is an inaugural Knowledge Exchange and Mobilization Scholar for UBC, and she received the Inaugural Public Humanities Hub award in recognition of her work as a public scholar and her commitment to assisting students and colleagues in expanding scholarly conversations through media engagement.

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