Ethics: An Indispensable Dimension in the University Rankings

University ranking systems attempt to provide an ordinal gauge to make an expert evaluation of the university's performance for a general audience. University rankings have always had their pros and cons in the higher education community. Some seriously question the usefulness, accuracy, and lack of consensus in ranking systems and therefore multidimensional ranking systems have been proposed to overcome some shortcomings of the earlier systems. Although the present ranking results may rather be rough, they are the only available sources that illustrate the complex university performance in a tangible format. Their relative accuracy has turned the ranking systems into an essential feature of the academic lifecycle within the foreseeable future. The main concern however, is that the present ranking systems totally neglect the ethical issues involved in university performances. Ethics should be a new dimension added into the university ranking systems, as it is an undisputable right of the public and all the parties involved in higher education to have an ethical evaluation of the university's achievements. In this paper, to initiate ethical assessment and rankings, the main factors involved in the university performances are reviewed from an ethical perspective. Finally, a basic benchmarking model for university ethical performance is presented.