The 2025 International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) Conference was held in Abu-Dhabi this December, and was attended by almost 700 professionals from 90 countries. One of the highlighted panels of the 2-day conference was chaired by György Fábri, professor of the Faculty.
IREG held their annual conferene, University Rankings and the Challenges of Sustainability together with Abu-Dhabi University’s event, 3rd International Conference on Advancing Sustainable Futures. The main topic of the forum was the reinvention of the connection between higher education rankings and sustainability.
The panel discussion titled Reimagining Rankings – Supporting a University’s Place and Direction with a Focus on Sustainability and Innovation was moderated by György Fábri, a professor at the ELTE PPK Institute for Adult Education Research and Knowledge Management. M’hamed el Aisati (Netherlands), Vice President of Elsevier Analytics & Data Services, as well as university leaders and experts from Denmark, Spain, the UK and the Arab world shared their views.
In his opening remarks, György Fábri articulated one of the fundamental dilemmas of the contemporary discourse on rankings: while rankings and publication metrics encourage quantification and continuous growth, sustainability requires a completely different approach. The question is, how can these two logics be made valid and workable at the same time?
The attendees all agreed that the solution did not lie in the rankings themselves, rather in how the institutes utilise these tools. The key is, can they use the indicators as contextualised feedback while not counting the ranking spots as a definitive measure of value.
Source: ranking.elte.hu