<p>This is my last post on your comments, because I think it really is becoming unrelated to the thread</p>
<p>Like I said those are formal published rankings of universities. There were schools before then that were considered top schools and the people in academia knew how they fared among each other. More often than not, the fame and fortunes of a university changed with innovation - from Bologna and Salamanca, to Oxford, to the German Research Universities, to Harvard and the American universities.</p>
<p>I googled, for your pleasure, and here’s a long read that tangentially describes how Universities in the **18th Century ** were regarded, and who is tops. Again, its not a Listing with 1,2,3,etc so don’t expect that, but clearly there was even back inthe 18th century, and understanding of the relative status of world universities vs each other</p>
<p>In the same light, UChicago became one of the the top World Universities even before your precious THEs and ARWU came to be. Its really funny how you think there was no academic consensus on the best universities before then. Where do you think those who your refer to as Chinese and English pseudo scientists got their idea in the first place? All they did was quantitatively formalie the ranking that already existed in the mind of academics.</p>
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