statistics don't lie, or not often anyway

It was a pleasant surprise to find the University of Ottawa ranked among the top 200 universities in the world in the latest Times Higher Education Supplement. The U of O, a former religious college of the Oblate order, became a public secular university after the 1939-45 world war, in order to attract government funds then being disbursed to universities. I was attracted here in 1969 by the opportunity to build a new department of epidemiology in a university that was then mediocre (if even that) and was then still sufficiently dominated or haunted by its religious catholic origins to have men of the cloth occupying all but about 2 or 3 of the top managerial positions. It had nowhere else to go but up. The faculty of medicine in 1969 ranked last among the 16 medical schools in Canada on objective criteria such as research funds awarded in competitions and performance of its graduates in national qualifying exams. At a faculty "retreat" in 1976 one after another of my fellow heads of department lamented our lowly status. When my turn came to speak,I pointed out to my colleagues that we had some real advantages: we were a small medical school in the nation's capital, rich in governmental and non-governmental resources including many that are relevant to medical research, in a city large enough to offer our small classes very rich clinical experience; class sizes were small enough so everyone knew everyone else; we were (and are) a bilingual school. Our downtown campus is less than a kilometer from Parliament Hill. (This helped to attract me to Ottawa but as the faculty of medicine expanded, the new Health Sciences Centre had to move to new Health Sciences Campus, 4 Km south). I said "retreat" was the wrong word to apply to our brainstorming session: we should have called it "advance" - we had nowhere else to go but up. I've seen the U of O go up steadily and increasingly rapidly during the years I have been here. Now we rank about 3rd or 4th nationally on objective criteria such as research funds attracted, 1st or 2nd in national qualifying medical exams, we are moving steadily upward in global rankings like the Times Higher Education Supplement, we have a downtown campus of handsome, although rather crowded buildings.
Looking over the league table of world universities, it's clear to me that like isn't always being compared to like. Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) is in top place although it is not a "full-service" university; I know the London School of Economics is not; Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, all are "full-service", the Ecole Normale Superior in Paris probably is not. The criteria on which the rankings are based include output of original research (based on original articles in top quality peer reviewed journals, original monographs, research facilities and funding) staff-student ratio, facilities such as libraries, etc. Probably I need to study the criteria used in the rankings a little more fully, but on the face of it, they seem valid, and I know they are taken seriously by people like university presidents. So as a long-time staff member (over 41 years and counting) I'm pleased and proud.