With this week’s release of the National Research Council’s new rankings of graduate programs, the University of Hawaii-Manoa has suddenly sliced its way into the superstar ranks of physics, as if powered by some new kind of high-intensity energy beam.
That may, in fact, be part of the explanation: Manoa’s physics department, now rated approximately 12th in the new criteria-based rankings after placing 81st in the NRC’s previous reputation-based survey, in 1995, boasts such stars as John M.J. Madey, inventor of the free-electron laser.
The more significant development, however, may be that among the three criteria most highly valued by the NRC for ranking physics programs, Manoa scored at the top in two—percentage of faculty with grants and publications per faculty member—and near the top in the other, citations per publication.
The NRC’s emphasis on the per-faculty statistics puts Manoa’s physics department—only 16 professors and 36 graduate students, but packed with expertise in areas such as cosmic rays and particle physics—alongside such heavyweights as Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, each several times bigger.
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“We have a very small department, but our output is very large,” said Pui K. Lam, chairman of Manoa’s physics department. For instance, the median number of publications per faculty member at Manoa is 9.09, while at Princeton it is 4.68.
Others aren’t necessarily convinced that Manoa has raced to the top, however. A smaller department typically means a narrow range of expertise, and that may prove limiting for students, said Omer M. Blaes, chairman of the physics department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, ranked fifth nationally on the NRC’s new criteria-based scale. “They may learn that that field is in fact not what they want to do, and it may be helpful to have a more diverse range of opportunities,” Mr. Blaes said.
Still, the rankings aren’t easily dismissed, as they are based on criteria that faculty members themselves have reported to be the most important indicators of program quality. The results may therefore help identify programs that truly excel rather than anoint those traditionally assumed to be the best.
That, at least, is the goal of the chancellor at Manoa, Virginia S. Hinshaw, who served as vice chair of the NRC panel that helped develop the new rankings. Ms. Hinshaw said that her physics department had hired high-quality faculty members since the last NRC rankings in 1995, and that “could surely” have improved its score this time. Reputations, in contrast, “take a long time to change, in a positive or negative direction,” Ms. Hinshaw said.
New Ranking Systems
To help make impressions about programs more reliable, the NRC this year issued two separate sets of rankings, all based on data from the 2005-6 academic year, with sometimes widely divergent results. One set is largely a reputational measure, similar to the NRC’s past approach, in which faculty members nationwide are essentially asked to vote on the programs they consider the strongest.
For the second method, new this year, the NRC asked faculty members to rank the aspects of a program they considered most important out of a group of 21 characteristics such as publications per faculty member, student test scores, and job-placement rates, and the NRC then used that information to create rankings.
Using that criteria-based method, and extrapolating from the statistical ranges of confidence provided by the NRC, Manoa’s physics program ranks about 12th nationally, thanks to its high scores on the three factors that the NRC’s faculty voters most valued. Using the reputation-based method, it still ranks around 80th, more or less matching its 81st-place rating from the reputation-oriented method of 1995.
The department has certainly earned some recognition. Its major projects include the Anita instrument, a radio telescope to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray neutrinos over Antarctica; the Belle experiment, an international collaboration studying basic behaviors in particle physics; and Mr. Madey’s free-electron laser, a machine for producing a high-intensity radiation beam with a range of settings wider than what’s possible with conventional laser equipment.
The high numbers of publications and citations are due to the work of researchers such as Klaus D. Sattler/rh, a professor of physics who has just finished pulling together a seven-volume Handbook of Nanophysics. Mr. Sattler, with some 160 publications over the past 35 years, is a pioneer in the study of carbon structures known as fullerenes, which have applications in a variety of fields including medicines and material sciences. He said his papers collected a total of 3,457 citations in the period from 1980 to 2006, roughly the time frame measured by the NRC report.
His colleague at Manoa, Mr. Madey, who has spent the past decade at Manoa, said he agreed with his chancellor and chairman that the program has long had a quality that, if measured more scientifically, would erase old reputational notions. Mr. Madey came to Hawaii from Duke University, where he got caught in a legal battle over the rights to his invention, and said he was attracted to Manoa by many factors including “the long tradition of the department for research in UV and soft X-ray spectroscopy.”
“And, of course,” he added, “Hawaii is a very nice place to live and raise a family.”
Counterparts at other institutions might not disagree with that point, but some do question the idea of putting so much weight on the number of publications or research grants. Such measures certainly can reflect productivity, but they can also be highly misleading, said Melissa Franklin, a professor of physics who heads her department at Harvard, ranked first nationally in both measuring systems in the new NRC report.
At the same time, “these things are measurable, whereas just asking other scientists’ opinions is pretty biased,” Ms. Franklin acknowledged. “Luckily, I think students considering graduate school ask around and don’t simply rely on these NRC results.”
