Sustainability indicators for university ranking

The main aim of this contribution is to investigate the possibility to include sustainability among the performance features that can be taken into consideration by university rankings. To this aim we propose a set of well-defined sustainability indicators related to different aspects of sustainability. Today the mission of a University can hardly be reduced to simply teaching and research. A University should contribute to building a new and improved society, and as such, it must be a visionary center of sustainability, innovation, and excellence, disseminating values and the well-being of society. Within this framework, sustainability has to be integrated into everyday activities. Within the University framework sustainability is often identified with environmental sciences; on the contrary, it is a pervasive interdisciplinary issue entailing a number of different issues. While one specific university ranking (The GreenMetric) has adopted a ranking criterion fully hinging on sustainability indicators, none of the main global rankings have so far addressed the issue. Both in terms of good practice assessments, and as an important signal to the society as a whole, the introduction of sustainability in global rankings could be an important addition to the existing metrics, and a significant dimension of comparison. Among all different aspects of sustainability, those considered here are of three different kind: the environmental (or green) sustainability; the social sustainability; the relation with the local community. Within this framework, we propose a set of sustainable indicators, deeply rooted in the relevant scientific literature, easily measurable, and sufficiently flexible, to be selectively included in different rankings.