Politics at Kingston University has leapt up the Guardian league table for UK Universities from ranking 61st in 2021 to 17th in 2022. This extraordinary result puts Politics in the top quartile nationwide for the discipline.
To emphasise the achievement, Kingston Politics is ranked the second highest post-92 institution in the entire UK, missing the top spot only by a small margin. The Guardian’s table ranks Kingston Politics markedly ahead of all comparable London region institutions, considered to be its competitors.
The achievement of a top quartile ranking is the fruit of the great commitment and teamwork between staff and students in the Politics department over the last three years.
Significantly, the result is entirely at odds with the unduly pessimistic forecasts of market ‘research’ that was commissioned and used as evidence by senior management for its decision to suspend and then close Politics undergraduate courses.
While a competitive league table is only one way of assessing departmental performance, even so it is an important one because it feeds through into candidate student choices.
The Guardian top quartile ranking completely validates the academic staff’s case that there has been a clear uptick in teaching and learning performance, and especially the students’ campaign to keep the department open.
Based on this new evidence, senior management should reconsider its closure decision as hasty, ill-informed but above all ill-judged.
Rather than bury the news as an inconvenient truth, senior management should build on this latest success, and reopen Kingston’s top quartile performing undergraduate Politics courses for recruitment in 2022/23.