Browse the Impact Rankings 2021 results

It¡¯s 4pm after another long day on Teams and Zoom and I experience something increasingly rare since March 2020: a phone call. It¡¯s from Times Higher Education. ¡°We¡¯re pleased to let you know that your entry in this year¡¯s Impact Rankings came out highest in the world.¡±

As many will know, these relatively new rankings are based on the United Nations¡¯ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I¡¯ve been a since they were introduced in 2019, so once I checked that it wasn¡¯t 1?April, three things sprang to mind, more or less in this order: fulfilment, bashfulness and hope.

Fulfilment came from it being exactly 10 years since my president and vice-chancellor, Dame Nancy Rothwell, set out our vision as the first UK university to make social responsibility a core university goal, equal alongside our more established commitments to research and teaching. Over this period, we¡¯ve invested considerable time, money and institutional capital in delivering societal impact across all our functions ¨C research, teaching, public engagement and professional services. But until THE developed this ranking, we had a nagging doubt: were we focusing on the ¡°right¡± priorities? And did we know if we were any ¡°good¡± at this work compared with others?

How the University of Manchester is addressing the SDGs

Bashfulness came from the fact that many of us in higher education, myself included, reserve a healthy dose of scepticism towards the burgeoning business of university rankings (a scepticism often inversely related to one¡¯s position in a given ranking). And isn¡¯t an ¡°SDG ranking¡± something of an oxymoron given the emphasis on equity and partnership in the global goals?

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Hope, though, was my enduring thought. This came from seeing how Manchester is part of a growing movement ¨C 1,240 universities from 98 countries and regions in 2021 ¨C of institutions who¡¯ve voluntarily compiled detailed evidence and case studies of how we¡¯re addressing the world¡¯s SDGs. ?

However much we sigh and eye-roll, governments, funders and media organisations are unlikely to desist?from sifting and sorting universities into various positions any time soon. So, if we¡¯re going to play this game of academic Top Trumps, let¡¯s at least try?to measure what counts.

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Traditional university rankings take what I¡¯d call an ¡°inside out¡± approach: they measure what we do inside our system and expect those outside to care. Examples include metrics of peer opinion, staff-student ratios and the proportion of first-class degrees awarded. They¡¯re incredibly important to those inside universities and largely irrelevant to everyone else. An ¡°outside in¡± approach to rankings starts with values and priorities in the wider world and then assesses how universities measure up to this.

Credit to THE then for taking an outside-in approach and adopting the SDGs as a framework. The 17 goals are, after all, agreed by 193 countries around the world and offer the closest thing we have to a democratic blueprint for addressing priorities on poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice.

Around the world we¡¯re being challenged to demonstrate our relevance to the governments, students, donors and taxpayers that foot our bills. Instead of retreating into our comfortable territory of faculties, schools and institutes, a growing cohort of universities like mine ¨C call them ¡°¡±, ¡°¡±?or ¡°¡±??¨C are embracing the SDGs as a way to better engage across sectors, borders and audiences, be these in Manchester, Manaus or Manila or in the public, private or non-profit sectors. We see their use in talking about purpose: what our universities are , not just what we¡¯re good at.

All rankings have flaws and drawbacks ¨C methodological and philosophical. This outside-in approach does, though, speak more closely than others to issues that the public have told my own university are important to them and?which they have reason to value.

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So, if the Impact Rankings value our work in areas?such as paying a living wage (SDGs 1, 8 and 10), involving local diaspora communities in our civic engagement (11), expanding education for sustainable development (4) or leading research partnerships to create a greener, fairer and healthier world (9 and 17), they can help, in some modest way, to make the work of universities more relevant to our stakeholders. A total of 1,239 other universities seem to agree and I think that¡¯s good company to be in.

Julian Skyrme is director of social responsibility at the University of Manchester.