Whither rankings - The Star

By KAREN CHAPMAN
educate@thestar.com.my

It is up to all academic staff to produce world-class research in order to improve their institution’s standing.

RANKINGS seem to be an inevitable aspect of today’s higher education scene in most parts of the world. Love or hate them, they cannot be ignored as rankings provide a useful basis for comparison of institutions and an insight into their strengths and weaknesses.

National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) senior executive vice president Prof Feng Da Hsuan said a flagship university like Universiti Malaya (UM) cannot afford to ignore rankings.

“UM has to take on the responsibility of changing the Malaysian mindset – because if it can’t do it, then no one can.

Prof Feng says it is important for a flagship university like UM to take rankings seriously.

“It should not be on the shoulders of the vice-chancellor alone but on every staff member and students too,” he said in an interview.

Prof Feng believes that it is only by carrying out research that UM can become an economic engine for the country.

“Although there might be pockets of resentment among university staff who do not want to take them (rankings) seriously and want things to remain the same, at the same time we cannot ignore this group of people.

“A sense of urgency or ‘uncomfortabilty’ must be injected as it is hard for people to change,” he said.

Prof Feng was at the university this week at the invitation of UM vice-chancellor Prof Datuk Dr Ghauth Jasmon to speak on how universities in Taiwan have taken on the rankings challenge.

Giving an example, Prof Feng explained how the country’s universities had a meeting with the education ministry and the national science council to decide that the research conducted should be published in high-impact journals.

Prof Ghauth says UM must move to the next level so it can be counted among the world league.

“An electrical engineer could be in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or UM doing research into LED and this would be published in similar sorts of publications. But areas like social science would include some form of local atmosphere in it.

“For subjects like Science or Engineering in Taiwanese universities, the research must be published either in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information)-indexed journals or Scopus (database of academic publishing),” he added.

Changing mindsets

Prof Feng said all university staff must accept the need for research as they could not remain static and stick to just teaching students.

“Research is a fundamental and ‘inalienable’ part of a university and someone who says his research cannot be measured is no longer acceptable.

“It is important for each faculty to decide how it wants to measure and define research output,” he explained.

On changing the mindsets of those who refused to carry out research and wanted to remain strictly as teachers, Prof Feng said there was no quick fix to the problem.

“One can’t ignore this group as every staff member is an asset and must be given the dignity they deserve, but the onus is on them to prove they can do it.

“But I have to applaud the vice-chancellor for having the guts to want to do something about rankings and research, as very few university presidents would do so,” he shared.

Prof Ghauth said he invited Prof Feng to share his experiences with UM staff as based on statistics, NCKU’s performance in the rankings has improved.

“UM must move to the next level so that it could be among the world class league,” he shared.

UM has introduced initiatives such as the Bright Sparks Programme where only the “best and brightest brains’’ would be invited, and the Academic Icon Unit to bring in top researchers from all over the world to be based at UM either for the short or long term.

There were already 400 bright sparks and 30 academic icons at the university, he added.

Prof Ghauth said earlier that UM would continue to participate in world ranking exercises as it needed to benchmark itself against the best.

“But now that we’ve been pushing, the research output has clearly improved and our ISI publications and citations have shot up, which is an indicator of how we’re doing.

“We have to change in order to go forward as we can’t compete if we stick to the old way of doing things,” he shared.

This, he added, could be seen in UM obtaining more projects such as being named as the anchor for the development of a health metropolis.

Announced in October, a health metropolis would be developed to create a healthcare ecosystem under one roof in Greater Kuala Lumpur/Klang Valley.

It is one of the six entry point projects identified for healthcare to generate RM35.5bil incremental gross national income contribution to reach RM50bil by 2020, and would help spur big results for healthcare, one of the 12 National Key Economic Areas identified in the 10th Malaysia Plan.

On where Asian institutions place compared to their Western counterparts on the various ranking systems in existence such as the Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities, Times Higher Education World University Rankings or QS World University Rankings, Prof Feng believes this was due to “structural stability”.

“As an example, Cambridge University and Harvard University are stable and are usually at the top irrespective of which ranking system.

“I believe this is due to structural stability as they know they are the best.

“UM has a real opportunity to reach this structural stability within the next 10 to 20 years,” he explained.

As Prof Feng put it, UM is the flagship university of the country and if it were to fall behind, higher education in the country would follow suit.