Flutterby™! : If you rank it, will they build it?

Kieran Healey looks at The Chronicle of Higher Education reporting on a new ranking of “Faculty Media Impact” conducted by the Center for a Public Anthropology. Keiran notes:

... As you can see from the screenshot above, the ranking found that the top unit at MIT was the Sociology Department. This is fantastic news in terms of impact, because MIT doesn’t actually have a Sociology Department. While we’ve known for a while that quantitative rankings can have interesting reactive effects on the entities they rank, we are clearly in new territory here.