World rankings: top 10 universities around the globe

Britain's leading higher education publication, The Times Higher Education, today released its 2012 reputation rankings for universities worldwide. Here is a list of the top 10.

8. University of Tokyo (Todai) – Tokyo

The University of Tokyo retained its No. 8 ranking and remains the only non-US or UK academic institution to hold a seat in the top 10. Founded in 1877, Todai, as the university is nicknamed, has seen 15 alumni go on to become Japanese prime ministers. Today’s student body consists of close to 29,000 students.
Reputation for teaching: 33.6
Reputation for research: 36.6
Todai has the most substantial disparity between this ranking and the World University Ranking, where it placed at No. 30.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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