Thursday, December 1, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
Social cohesion: making it happen
A famous Den Xiaoping quote goes : “Let some people get rich first”. Yet, in Spring 2011, the Beijing city authorities banned all outdoor advertisement of luxury goods on the grounds that they might contribute to a “politically unhealthy environment”.
The trouble with growth is that inequalities tend to rise with it. Growth does not necessarily translate into better life satisfaction – far from it, as the experience of Thailand or Tunisia shows. What happens when the fruits of growth are not shared, when people feel that income inequalities are rising and food prices soaring? Well, that’s when the so-called “politically unhealthy environment” sets in.
Millions voiced their frustration during the Arab Spring. From Tahrir square to the streets of Tunis, a huge emerging middle class showed that it has a tremendous capacity to mobilize people. It demands governments that are open and transparent, as well as more and better services. How can governments answer these demands? How can they go about redistributing the fruits of growth?
A new policy agenda is needed: one that focuses not only on growth but also on openness, fairness and inclusion. Social cohesion needs to be at the centre of policy making. Failing this, we may (re)enter a vicious circle where inequalities create a sense of injustice, which in turn can lead to (mass) protest and sometimes violence. As a result, social peace and stability, as well as long-term growth, may be jeopardized.
How can governments foster social cohesion? Perspectives on Global Development: Social Cohesion in a Shifting World from the OECD Development Centre published today, answers this. With this latest report, the Development Centre again proves that it is engaged with the world we live in, whether discussing tax revenues or the merits of football as a factor of social cohesion: having a sense of community can make a difference.
The report first shows how the world has undergone a shift of historical significance over the past decade, with the centre of economic gravity moving towards the East and South. The figures speak for themselves: in 2000, OECD countries represented around 60% of global GDP but by 2010 this was down to 51%, and it will be only 43% by 2030. In fast-growing economies, per capita growth rate was more than double that of high-income OECD countries over the last decade.
It is precisely this shifting wealth that opens a window of opportunity for development and social cohesion. In fast-growing economies, fiscal revenues rose from 20% of GDP on average in 2000 to 27% in 2008. These countries now have the (fiscal) resources to finance social policies that can make the difference – or, can they?
This report argues that public policies can make a difference. OECD countries with initially high income inequalities manage to redistribute income through taxes and transfers. The challenge is to leave no one behind. A cohesive society reduces inequality between groups and ensures that all citizen – the poor, the middle-earners, and the rich – are socially included.
Over the last decade, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. This report argues that the emerging middle class should not be ignored either. Today, nearly 1 billion out of the 2 billion people living on 10 to 100 dollars a day in the world – the global middle class – live in fast-growing countries. This number is projected to exceed 3 billion in 2030.
The emerging middle class is a critical economic and social actor because of its potential as an engine of growth, particularly in the largest developing countries such as China and India. Its contribution to social cohesion can be high, and its expectations are sharply rising. What is needed is a social contract between citizens and the state, which entails more and better services in exchange for paying taxes. This would foster a virtuous circle that boosts social cohesion as well as growth. Citizens are more willing to pay taxes in societies where they feel a sense of belonging. Fiscal policy is thus a good place to start.
As the report highlights, fiscal, social and employment policies should go hand in hand. With recent innovations in social protection, the poorest are covered by social assistance and the wealthy by either contribution-based or private alternatives. Yet, a considerable number of (informal) middle-class workers are stuck in the uncomfortable “missing middle” of coverage. More comprehensive social protection systems should protect all sections of the population.
Stronger labour market institutions are also needed. They should aim to create more “good” jobs and reduce the duality in labour markets – between standard and non-standard contracts or between formal and informal workers. This will be critical in reducing inequalities and fostering social cohesion.
A series of cross-cutting issues have to be addressed coherently as well, including education, gender equality, food policy, the integration of immigrants, and institutions.
As Albert Einstein once said, “Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one”. Ignoring people’s desires and the reality in which they live is perilous. Technocratically good policies that do that just won’t work and giving space to dissenting voices is essential to the creation of a sustainable, socially cohesive society.
Social cohesion is a means for development as well as an end in itself. That, along with equality of opportunities is what social cohesion is all about. What if social cohesion were the 21st century’s holy grail? A holy grail that can only be attained with some long-term vision and commitment – and a smile. Failing that, there might be rough times ahead.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
The Constructive Responsibility of Intellectuals - Archon Fung
ONLINE SEPTEMBER 9, 2011
The Constructive Responsibility of Intellectuals
Using Privilege to Advance Democracy and Justice
Archon Fung
This article is a reply to The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux by Noam Chomsky.
No one has taught my generation and the one that preceded it (or me personally) more about the social responsibility of intellectuals than Noam Chomsky. His reprise essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” is an excellent and eloquent account of the tradition of public intellectual criticism of which he has been such an important part. He is half right.
I am in complete agreement with the premise of the 1967 and 2011 essays. Intellectuals, especially those who enjoy tenure at elite academic institutions in Western democracies, are afforded the privileges of leisure, access to information, liberty to pursue the questions that interest them, training to do so competently, and even substantial funding and labor to support their investigations.
These privileges are afforded us by the societies in which we live, and we bear the responsibility of answering questions that are important to that society.
In the domain of politics and policy, Chomsky stresses the responsibility of intellectuals to help their societies understand the truth about their governments. States, not least the United States, often act immorally, hypocritically, deceptively, and unjustly. Officials and other elites frequently justify these actions through deception and ideology. Intellectuals can help other citizens come to more truthful understanding of what their governments are doing and what is being done in their name. With regard to the foreign policy of the United States—in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—any honest reader of Chomsky’s work over the past 50 years must acknowledge that there is plenty to criticize.
But at the risk of belaboring the obvious, criticism is not the only public responsibility of the intellectual. Intellectuals can also join citizens—and sometimes governments—to construct a world that is more just and democratic.
One such constructive role is aiding popular movements and organizations in their efforts to advance justice and democracy. The distinctive constructive contribution of intellectuals is to help gather and analyze information about what works and what doesn’t and to offer ideas for activists—and for the broader public—to consider. Intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill, perhaps most clearly in his writing on the status of women but also on democracy, are part of this tradition. Scholar-activists such as Gary Bellow helped to invent legal-reform strategies that focus on building power in popular organizations rather than merely appealing to judges. Jane Mansbridge, in her analysis of the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, suggests more promising strategies for subsequent reform movements. Though he was not a public intellectual, John Rawls developed a conception of justice that has helped many others to understand not just how their own society is unjust, but what moves toward justice look like. Philippe van Parijs is the most forceful proponent of the “universal basic income,” a proposal that has won the support of international civil society organizations and even policymakers in some countries. Joel Rogers has developed interesting projects to reconfigure labor unions in the United States in ways that make them more inclusive and successful as participants in economic-development projects.
Another constructive role is that of the democratic policy intellectual. Here, the distinctive contribution of the intellectual is to analyze information and devise ideas that can improve the democratic character of public policy and state action or make them more just. Amartya Sen’s work on capabilities, for example, provided the foundation for other development economists to formulate the Human Development Index. Where attention and policy historically have focused only on economic growth, the HDI has shifted some of that focus toward a broader range of measures that include health, educational attainment, and standard of living. Less famously, scholars such as Leonardo Avritzer, Boaventura de Souza Santos, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi have informed policymakers in Brazil and elsewhere about how to build successful participatory governance. The products of these engagements between intellectuals and policymakers always have blemishes. Such engagements, however, often make the world a bit better—more just and democratic—than it would otherwise have been.
Those who engage the world as constructive public intellectuals in these two ways face temptations that the critical intellectual does not. First is the temptation of expertise: unjustified confidence in one’s own judgment. In his 1967 essay on the responsibility of intellectuals, Chomsky rightly derides the attempts of social scientists and philosophers to solve the problems of the day: “The only debatable issue, it seems to me,” he wrote, “is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in great religious and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.”
Many policy intellectuals do regard themselves as experts in the sense that they believe others should obey their pronouncements, derived as they are from science, in fields such as economics, social welfare, and even human values. There is a more democratic approach to expertise, acutely conscious of contingency its own fallibility, in which constructive social-movement and policy intellectuals offer their ideas and analysis in order to move a broader public discussion forward.
The second temptation is professional status, wealth, influence, and authority. One doesn’t have to be in the ideas business long to recognize that there are personal and professional consequences—some subtle and others less so—to what one says and writes. As Chomsky has often said, one of the privileges of living in the contemporary United States is that we are spared from the truly dire consequences that those—such as the Archbishop Romero and Father Ignacio Ellacuría—in other circumstances suffer. Nevertheless, intellectuals who seek influence among policymakers must watch what they say and even censor themselves. It would be incredible to deny this. But this basic fact does not mean that scholars should refrain from trying to become democratic policy intellectuals. Intellectual integrity requires that they resist the temptation to distort their judgments to achieve status or to please authority. One way to fulfill their public responsibility is to use what status, influence, and authority they have to advance democracy and justice.
The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux - Noam Chomsky
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011
The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux
Using Privilege to Challenge the State
Noam Chomsky
A San Francisco mural depicting Archbishop Óscar Romero / Photograph: Franco Folini
Since we often cannot see what is happening before our eyes, it is perhaps not too surprising that what is at a slight distance removed is utterly invisible. We have just witnessed an instructive example: President Obama’s dispatch of 79 commandos into Pakistan on May 1 to carry out what was evidently a planned assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama bin Laden. Though the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, could easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered, his body dumped at sea without autopsy. The action was deemed “just and necessary” in the liberal press. There will be no trial, as there was in the case of Nazi criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal authorities abroad who approve of the operation but object to the procedure. As Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of assassination in international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the practice by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the call for assassination as “international outlawry” in 1863, an “outrage,” which “civilized nations” view with “horror” and merits the “sternest retaliation.”
In 1967, writing about the deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam, I discussed the responsibility of intellectuals, borrowing the phrase from an important essay of Dwight Macdonald’s after World War II. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 arriving, and widespread approval in the United States of the assassination of the chief suspect, it seems a fitting time to revisit that issue. But before thinking about the responsibility of intellectuals, it is worth clarifying to whom we are referring.
The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”
Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another form, and today offers a framework for determining the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?
• • •
One answer came during World War I, when prominent intellectuals on all sides lined up enthusiastically in support of their own states.
In their “Manifesto of 93 German Intellectuals,” leading figures in one of the world’s most enlightened states called on the West to “have faith in us! Believe, that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilized nation, to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Kant, is just as sacred as its own hearths and homes.” Their counterparts on the other side of the intellectual trenches matched them in enthusiasm for the noble cause, but went beyond in self-adulation. In The New Republic they proclaimed, “The effective and decisive work on behalf of the war has been accomplished by . . . a class which must be comprehensively but loosely described as the ‘intellectuals.’” These progressives believed they were ensuring that the United States entered the war “under the influence of a moral verdict reached, after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community.” They were, in fact, the victims of concoctions of the British Ministry of Information, which secretly sought “to direct the thought of most of the world,” but particularly the thought of American progressive intellectuals who might help to whip a pacifist country into war fever.
John Dewey was impressed by the great “psychological and educational lesson” of the war, which proved that human beings—more precisely, “the intelligent men of the community”—can “take hold of human affairs and manage them . . . deliberately and intelligently” to achieve the ends sought, admirable by definition.
Not everyone toed the line so obediently, of course. Notable figures such as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were, like Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished with particular severity—a ten-year prison term for raising questions about President Wilson’s “war for democracy and human rights.” Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, though Harding finally relented. Some, such as Thorstein Veblen, were chastised but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his position in the Food Administration after preparing a report showing that the shortage of farm labor could be overcome by ending Wilson’s brutal persecution of labor, specifically the International Workers of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the progressive journals after criticizing the “league of benevolently imperialistic nations” and their exalted endeavors.
The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished. Thus in retrospect Wilson and the progressive intellectuals who offered him their services are greatly honored, but not Debs. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered and have hardly been heroes of the intellectual mainstream. Russell continued to be bitterly condemned until after his death—and in current biographies still is.
Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their governments are considered the responsible ones.
In the 1970s prominent scholars distinguished the two categories of intellectuals more explicitly. A 1975 study, The Crisis of Democracy, labeled Brunetière’s ridiculous eccentrics “value-oriented intellectuals” who pose a “challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.” Among other misdeeds, these dangerous creatures “devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority,” and they challenge the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young.” Some even sink to the depths of questioning the nobility of war aims, as Bourne had. This castigation of the miscreants who question authority and the established order was delivered by the scholars of the liberal internationalist Trilateral Commission; the Carter administration was largely drawn from their ranks.
Like The New Republic progressives during World War I, the authors of The Crisis of Democracy extend the concept of the “intellectual” beyond Brunetière’s ridiculous eccentrics to include the better sort as well: the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals,” responsible and serious thinkers who devote themselves to the constructive work of shaping policy within established institutions and to ensuring that indoctrination of the young proceeds on course.
It took Dewey only a few years to shift from the responsible technocratic and policy-oriented intellectual of World War I to an anarchist of the lecture-platform, as he denounced the “un-free press” and questioned “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.”
What particularly troubled the Trilateral scholars was the “excess of democracy” during the time of troubles, the 1960s, when normally passive and apathetic parts of the population entered the political arena to advance their concerns: minorities, women, the young, the old, working people . . . in short, the population, sometimes called the “special interests.” They are to be distinguished from those whom Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind,” who are “the principal architects” of government policy and pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.” The role of the masters in the political arena is not deplored, or discussed, in the Trilateral volume, presumably because the masters represent “the national interest,” like those who applauded themselves for leading the country to war “after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community” had reached its “moral verdict.”
To overcome the excessive burden imposed on the state by the special interests, the Trilateralists called for more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity on the part of the less deserving, perhaps even a return to the happy days when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” and democracy therefore flourished.
The Trilateralists could well have claimed to be adhering to the original intent of the Constitution, “intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period” by delivering power to a “better sort” of people and barring “those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power,” in the accurate words of the historian Gordon Wood. In Madison’s defense, however, we should recognize that his mentality was pre-capitalist. In determining that power should be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” “a the more capable set of men,” he envisioned those men on the model of the “enlightened Statesmen” and “benevolent philosopher” of the imagined Roman world. They would be “pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property, and independent circumstances” “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” So endowed, these men would “refine and enlarge the public views,” guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities. In a similar vein, the progressive Wilsonian intellectuals might have taken comfort in the discoveries of the behavioral sciences, explained in 1939 by the psychologist and education theorist Edward Thorndike:
It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and morality including good will toward one’s fellows . . . . Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves.
A comforting doctrine, though some might feel that Adam Smith had the sharper eye.
• • •
Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their governments are considered responsible, and value-oriented intellectuals are dismissed or denigrated. At home that is.
With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories of intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old Soviet Union, the value-oriented intellectuals were the honored dissidents, while we had only contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. Similarly in Iran we honor the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment. And elsewhere generally.
The honorable term “dissident” is used selectively. It does not, of course, apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented intellectuals at home or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was removed from the official terrorist list in 2008, and can now travel to the United States without special authorization.
Father Ignacio Ellacuría
Twenty years earlier, he was the criminal leader of one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a Pentagon report. That is why President Reagan had to support the apartheid regime, increasing trade with South Africa in violation of congressional sanctions and supporting South Africa’s depredations in neighboring countries, which led, according to a UN study, to 1.5 million deaths. That was only one episode in the war on terrorism that Reagan declared to combat “the plague of the modern age,” or, as Secretary of State George Shultz had it, “a return to barbarism in the modern age.” We may add hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America and tens of thousands more in the Middle East, among other achievements. Small wonder that the Great Communicator is worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost,” recently honored further by a statue that defaces the American Embassy in London.
What particularly troubled the Trilateral scholars was the ‘excess of democracy’ in the 1960s.
The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom and justice in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of honored dissidents. For example, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, had their heads blown off on the direct orders of the Salvadoran high command. The perpetrators were from an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail of blood and terror, and had just returned from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The murdered priests are not commemorated as honored dissidents, nor are others like them throughout the hemisphere. Honored dissidents are those who called for freedom in enemy domains in Eastern Europe, who certainly suffered, but not remotely like their counterparts in Latin America.
The distinction is worth examination, and tells us a lot about the two senses of the phrase “responsibility of intellectuals,” and about ourselves. It is not seriously in question, as John Coatsworth writes in the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington.
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Why then the distinction? It might be argued that what happened in Eastern Europe is far more momentous than the fate of the South at our hands. It would be interesting to see the argument spelled out. And also to see the argument explaining why we should disregard elementary moral principles, among them that if we are serious about suffering and atrocities, about justice and rights, we will focus our efforts on where we can do the most good—typically, where we share responsibility for what is being done. We have no difficulty demanding that our enemies follow such principles.
Few of us care, or should, what Andrei Sakharov or Shirin Ebadi say about U.S. or Israeli crimes; we admire them for what they say and do about those of their own states, and the conclusion holds far more strongly for those who live in more free and democratic societies, and therefore have far greater opportunities to act effectively. It is of some interest that in the most respected circles, practice is virtually the opposite of what elementary moral values dictate.
But let us conform and keep only to the matter of historical import.
The U.S. wars in Latin America from 1960 to 1990, quite apart from their horrors, have long-term historical significance. To consider just one important aspect, in no small measure they were wars against the Church, undertaken to crush a terrible heresy proclaimed at Vatican II in 1962, which, under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,” in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng, restoring the teachings of the gospels that had been put to rest in the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, instituting “a revolution” that converted “the persecuted church” to a “persecuting church.” The heresy of Vatican II was taken up by Latin American bishops who adopted the “preferential option for the poor.” Priests, nuns, and laypersons then brought the radical pacifist message of the gospels to the poor, helping them organize to ameliorate their bitter fate in the domains of U.S. power.
That same year, 1962, President Kennedy made several critical decisions. One was to shift the mission of the militaries of Latin America from “hemispheric defense”—an anachronism from World War II—to “internal security,” in effect, war against the domestic population, if they raise their heads. Charles Maechling, who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision as a shift from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” One major initiative was a military coup in Brazil, planned in Washington and implemented shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, instituting a murderous and brutal national security state. The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, including the 1973 coup installing the Pinochet dictatorship, and later the most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship, Reagan’s favorite. Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” who is now revered for his achievements.
The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy, culminating a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.” The victors in the war against the Church declare their responsibility with pride. The School of the Americas (since renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers, announces as one of its “talking points” that the liberation theology that was initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the assistance of the US army.”
Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were almost a final blow. More was needed.
A year later Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise and shock of Washington, which like others had anticipated the easy victory of its own candidate from the privileged elite, the organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The United States at once moved to undermine the elected government, and after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite supporters. Trade was increased in violation of international sanctions and increased further under Clinton, who also authorized the Texaco oil company to supply the murderous rulers, in defiance of his own directives.
I will skip the disgraceful aftermath, amply reviewed elsewhere, except to point out that in 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, joined by Canada, forcefully intervened, kidnapped President Aristide (who had been elected again), and shipped him off to central Africa. He and his party were effectively barred from the farcical 2010–11 elections, the most recent episode in a horrendous history that goes back hundreds of years and is barely known among the perpetrators of the crimes, who prefer tales of dedicated efforts to save the suffering people from their grim fate.
If we are serious about justice, we will focus our efforts where we share responsibility for what is being done.
Another fateful Kennedy decision in 1962 was to send a special forces mission to Colombia, led by General William Yarborough, who advised the Colombian security forces to undertake “paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,” activities that “should be backed by the United States.” The meaning of the phrase “communist proponents” was spelled out by the respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, who wrote that the Kennedy administration “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” ushering in
what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine. . . . [not] defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game . . . [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.
In a 1980 study, Lars Schoultz, the leading U.S. academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, found that U.S. aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens . . . to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” That included military aid, was independent of need, and continued through the Carter years. Ever since the Reagan administration, it has been superfluous to carry out such a study. In the 1980s one of the most notorious violators was El Salvador, which accordingly became the leading recipient of U.S. military aid, to be replaced by Colombia when it took the lead as the worst violator of human rights in the hemisphere. Vázquez Carrizosa himself was living under heavy guard in his Bogotá residence when I visited him there in 2002 as part of a mission of Amnesty International, which was opening its year-long campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia because of the country’s horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists, and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless. Terror and torture in Colombia were supplemented by chemical warfare (“fumigation”), under the pretext of the war on drugs, leading to huge flight to urban slums and misery for the survivors. Colombia’s attorney general’s office now estimates that more than 140,000 people have been killed by paramilitaries, often acting in close collaboration with the U.S.-funded military.
Signs of the slaughter are everywhere. On a nearly impassible dirt road to a remote village in southern Colombia a year ago, my companions and I passed a small clearing with many simple crosses marking the graves of victims of a paramilitary attack on a local bus. Reports of the killings are graphic enough; spending a little time with the survivors, who are among the kindest and most compassionate people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, makes the picture more vivid, and only more painful.
This is the briefest sketch of terrible crimes for which Americans bear substantial culpability, and that we could easily ameliorate, at the very least.
But it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies, a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.
The victims within our domains, unlike those in enemy states, are not merely ignored and quickly forgotten, but are also cynically insulted. One striking illustration came a few weeks after the murder of the Latin American intellectuals in El Salvador. Vaclav Havel visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress. Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the “defenders of freedom” in Washington who “understood the responsibility that flowed from” being “the most powerful nation on earth”—crucially, their responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts shortly before.
The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation. Havel reminds us that “we live in a romantic age,” Anthony Lewis gushed. Other prominent liberal commentators reveled in Havel’s “idealism, his irony, his humanity,” as he “preached a difficult doctrine of individual responsibility” while Congress “obviously ached with respect” for his genius and integrity; and asked why America lacks intellectuals so profound, who “elevate morality over self-interest” in this way, praising us for the tortured and mutilated corpses that litter the countries that we have left in misery. We need not tarry on what the reaction would have been had Father Ellacuría, the most prominent of the murdered Jesuit intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a dozen of his associates—a performance that is inconceivable.
John Dewey / Photograph: New York Public Library / Photoresearchers, Inc.
The assassination of bin Laden, too, directs our attention to our insulted victims. There is much more to say about the operation—including Washington’s willingness to face a serious risk of major war and even leakage of fissile materials to jihadis, as I have discussed elsewhere—but let us keep to the choice of name: Operation Geronimo. The name caused outrage in Mexico and was protested by indigenous groups in the United States, but there seems to have been no further notice of the fact that Obama was identifying bin Laden with the Apache Indian chief. Geronimo led the courageous resistance to invaders who sought to consign his people to the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement,” in the words of the grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual architect of manifest destiny, uttered long after his own contributions to these sins. The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne . . . We might react differently if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was ‘nothing of very great consequence,’ Kissinger said.
Denial of these “heinous sins” is sometimes explicit. To mention a few recent cases, two years ago in one of the world’s leading left-liberal intellectual journals, The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker outlined what he learned from the work of the “heroic historian” Edmund Morgan: namely, that when Columbus and the early explorers arrived they “found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people . . . . In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.” The calculation is off by many tens of millions, and the “vastness” included advanced civilizations throughout the continent. No reactions appeared, though four months later the editors issued a correction, noting that in North America there may have been as many as 18 million people—and, unmentioned, tens of millions more “from tropical jungle to the frozen north.” This was all well known decades ago—including the advanced civilizations and the “merciless and perfidious cruelty” of the “extermination”—but not important enough even for a casual phrase. In London Review of Books a year later, the noted historian Mark Mazower mentioned American “mistreatment of the Native Americans,” again eliciting no comment. Would we accept the word “mistreatment” for comparable crimes committed by enemies?
• • •
If the responsibility of intellectuals refers to their moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the cause of freedom, justice, mercy, and peace—and to speak out not simply about the abuses of our enemies, but, far more significantly, about the crimes in which we are implicated and can ameliorate or terminate if we choose—how should we think of 9/11?
The notion that 9/11 “changed the world” is widely held, understandably. The events of that day certainly had major consequences, domestic and international. One was to lead President Bush to re-declare Ronald Reagan’s war on terrorism—the first one has been effectively “disappeared,” to borrow the phrase of our favorite Latin American killers and torturers, presumably because the consequences do not fit well with preferred self images. Another consequence was the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and more recently military interventions in several other countries in the region and regular threats of an attack on Iran (“all options are open,” in the standard phrase). The costs, in every dimension, have been enormous. That suggests a rather obvious question, not asked for the first time: was there an alternative?
A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won major successes in his war against the United States. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” the journalist Eric Margolis writes.
The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap. . . . Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction . . . . may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States.
A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates that the final bill will be $3.2–4 trillion. Quite an impressive achievement by bin Laden.
That Washington was intent on rushing into bin Laden’s trap was evident at once. Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, writes, “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.” The al Qaeda leader, Scheuer continues, “is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world.”
And, as Scheuer explains, bin Laden largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.
There is good reason to believe that the jihadi movement could have been split and undermined after the 9/11 attack, which was criticized harshly within the movement. Furthermore, the “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but no such idea was even considered by decision-makers in government. It seems no thought was given to the Taliban’s tentative offer—how serious an offer, we cannot know—to present the al Qaeda leaders for a judicial proceeding.
At the time, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the horrendous crime of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”—an accurate judgment. The crimes could have been even worse. Suppose that Flight 93, downed by courageous passengers in Pennsylvania, had bombed the White House, killing the president. Suppose that the perpetrators of the crime planned to, and did, impose a military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Suppose the new dictatorship established, with the support of the criminals, an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere, and, as icing on the cake, brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
As we all should know, this is not a thought experiment. It happened. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the United States succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s ghastly regime in office. The dictatorship then installed the Chicago Boys—economists trained at the University of Chicago—to reshape Chile’s economy. Consider the economic destruction, the torture and kidnappings, and multiply the numbers killed by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, and you will see just how much more devastating the first 9/11 was.
Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities.
The goal of the overthrow, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us”—screw us by trying to take over their own resources and more generally to pursue a policy of independent development along lines disliked by Washington. In the background was the conclusion of Nixon’s National Security Council that if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.” Washington’s “credibility” would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently.
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.
• • •
It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, and the value-oriented punished in one or another way. The pattern goes back to the earliest records. It was the man accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock, much as Dreyfusards were accused of “corrupting souls, and, in due course, society as a whole” and the value-oriented intellectuals of the 1960s were charged with interference with “indoctrination of the young.”
In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary standards are dissident intellectuals, called “prophets” in the English translation. They bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, denounced the Prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first “self-hating Jew” or “anti-American” in the modern counterparts. The prophets were treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who were later condemned as false prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.
As for the responsibility of intellectuals, there does not seem to me to be much to say beyond some simple truths. Intellectuals are typically privileged—merely an observation about usage of the term. Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
'Tiger mom' Chua urges Asian parents to relax
Source: http://my.news.yahoo.com/tiger-mom-chua-urges-asian-parents-relax-060741599.html#ugccmt-container
US "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua Thursday urged strict Asian parents to relax and give their children more freedom but also to avoid the "romanticised" Western focus on creativity over hard work.
The Chinese-American law professor at Yale University sparked international controversy this year with her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother", which detailed the strict parenting regime she put in place for her children and called this approach the key to success.
"I think Western parents give kids too much freedom, too much choice at a young age... Asian parents like in Korea have opposite problems, giving too little freedom, too little choice for our kids," Chua said in a speech at a Seoul forum.
She stressed that Asian parents often put too much focus on children's academic excellence while failing to foster social skills and "emotional intelligence".
"As we head into the 21st century and global competition gets intense, simply emphasising hard work and memorising and long hours is not going to be enough," she said, urging a balance between the different parenting philosophies.
Chua criticised US parents and schools for deferring "too quickly to their young kids' choices", but at the same time called on Asian parents at the other extreme to let go once their kids become old enough.
"To me this type of parenting should be when kids are very young. I think it actually should start to end when they are around 11, 12, or 13," said Chua, adding she mistakenly "went too far with it" with her daughters.
Chua earlier met with a hailstorm of criticism, including death threats, after excerpts of her book were published in the Wall Street Journal -- a response which she said turned her life upside down.
In the book, she allows nothing less than top school marks from her two daughters, no sleepovers or watching television, and makes them do mandatory piano or violin study.
Chua defended many of the parenting methods described in her book, saying US parents mistakenly prioritise a "romanticised notion of creativity" over the hard work and discipline that is the basis for such creativity.
She said her younger daughter, who six years ago hated maths after failing a test, now cites it as her favourite subject after long hours of study involving a stopwatch led her to excel.
"It's our job to prepare them for the future...there's something very joyful and fulfilling about doing something extremely well," she told the World Knowledge Forum hosted by Maeil Business Newspaper.
Chua blamed America's "fear of Asia" for the heated response to her book, which she said was written as a family satire.
"I think...the book tapped into America's deepest anxiety. One is fear of parenting and the second is Asia rising with the US declining," said Chua.
First, Catch Your Faculty-A Recipe for Excellence
First, Catch Your Faculty-A Recipe for Excellence
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
Published: October 16, 2011
LONDON — Is there a foolproof recipe for academic success? Philip Altbach and Jamil Salmi, the co-authors of “The Road to Academic Excellence,” a new study of what makes for a “world-class research university,” suggest there just might be.
With funding from the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, the two scholars have examined efforts by 10 universities around the world, from China and South Korea to India, Nigeria, Mexico and Chile, to gain admission into the elite ranks of the world’s leading universities.
Some, like the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (founded in 1888) or the National University of Singapore (founded in 1905) were venerable institutions. Others, like the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay (founded in 1958) were newer. And some, like Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology (1986) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1991) were launched with an explicit goal of making a global impact. But what they all have in common, say the two authors, is that in each case “these universities play a key societal role by serving as cultural institutions, centers for social commentary and criticism, and intellectual hubs.”
“We’re both convinced that serious research universities are important in almost all societies,” Mr. Altbach, who is the director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, said in an interview.
Mr. Salmi coordinates the World Bank’s activities related to higher education, and has served as a policy adviser to numerous governments. Both men have published widely on issues of academic quality and improvement, and some portions of their new 390-page study, which will be released later this month at a conference on World Class Universities in Shanghai, read like the scholarly papers they are. But their conclusions are as direct, and nearly as concise, as the advice supposedly given in a 19th-century recipe for rabbit stew: “First, catch your rabbit.” Only in this case the advice would be: “First, catch your faculty.”
“You can say there are lots of ingredients a university needs to be really successful,” Mr. Altbach said. “Independence, luck, persistence, some kind of strategic vision, adequate resources — usually, but not always, public resources — good governance structures, good leadership, the ability to attract good students and so on. But we have found that the quality of the faculty is really crucial.”
“The difference between a good university and great university comes down to talent,” Mr. Salmi said. “The rest of what you need is just there to attract the talent and enable them to do their best work.”
In his summary of the study, Mr. Salmi alludes to the increasingly global competition for academic talent, spurred on partly by the growth of various international rankings, and resulting in what he describes as “a virtuous cycle, where the highest-ranked institutions can attract the best faculty and the best researchers, in turn, want to belong to and be validated by the highest-ranked universities. This cycle then extends to the best students wanting to study with the best faculty.”
In his writings Mr. Salmi often alludes to a triad of factors: talent, funding and internal governance. When all three are in alignment, an institution can launch itself onto the world stage with remarkable speed. Gerald Postiglione, author of the chapter studying the meteoric rise of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), says that the conditions that contributed to that university’s success “might be difficult to replicate.” Within just 10 years of its founding in 1991 the university was widely considered one of the best in Asia. By 2010 it was in the top tier of universities around the world.
“Putting together a world-class university from scratch, a hundred things can go wrong,” he said. “Not only must you recruit very carefully, and then provide your new staff with sufficient resources to do good research and good teaching. Money of course is important. But what I learned is that other things are more important. Academic freedom is more important. And in this case you also had a group of academics who had a sense of commitment to the institution and a sense of responsibility to the larger society — not just to the university, but to the place where it is located.”
A majority of academics initially recruited by HKUST were either born in China or had direct family ties to China, but had been educated abroad, in the United States or in Europe. For example the physicist Woo Chia-wei, HKUST’s founding president, was born in Shanghai and received his doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis before becoming president of San Francisco State University. The fledgling institution’s ability to draw on the idealism and drive of the Chinese diaspora was, according to Mr. Postiglione, “the magic ingredient” that enabled the university to attract world-class scholars.
Indian universities, especially the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, once benefited from a similar dynamic. However, Mr. Altbach and Mr. Salmi both pointed to the IIT Bombay as an institution endangered by its own success. IITs are still the most competitive educational institutions in the world, with an acceptance rate of only 1.6 percent (608 applicants for each place). But the failure to recruit a truly international faculty, and academic salaries the authors describe as “ridiculously low” compared to IIT graduates who go into the private sector, mean that India is likely to remain “a country of tremendous potential, but not much more accomplishment,” Mr. Altbach said.
Perhaps the saddest portion of their study charts the rise, fall, and attempted resurgence of the University of Ibadan. Once considered among the leading universities in Africa, whose graduates include novelist Chinua Achebe and the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Ibadan’s reputation for excellence became a casualty of Nigeria’s civil war, successive military dictatorships and years of political unrest.
Another chapter attempts to account for the University of Malaysia’s failure to keep pace with the accomplishments of the University of Singapore — two institutions that both began as offshoots of the same British colonial university. “Everybody likes to talk about success,” Mr. Salmi said. “But the lessons of what doesn’t go well are sometimes more relevant.”
In the case of Ibadan, the study showed the importance of what Mr. Salmi called the “education ecosystem” — the interplay of social, political, economic and even geographic factors that create the environment within which universities operate. In Singapore the decisions to prioritize research, to keep English as the language of instruction, and to follow a merit-based admissions policy have all contributed to the university’s success, the study said, whereas the Malaysian government’s imposition of admissions quotas for different ethnic groups, and a generally higher level of political interference in university management, have kept that university at a disadvantage.
In his conclusion, Mr. Salmi cited “disturbing political developments, from the burning of churches to the whipping of a woman for drinking beer in public,” which he said cast a shadow on Malaysia’s “image as an open and tolerant society.” However, referring to the impact of tighter visa regulations for foreign graduates in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, he added that no country is “immune to restrictions on freedom of movement and to threats to academic freedom having a negative impact on the country’s elite universities.”
No matter how rich or how celebrated its universities, no country can afford to be complacent, Mr. Salmi said. The African case study, he added, “serves as a stern warning that success is fragile and that prestigious universities, like famous empires, are prone to fateful destinies should the fundamental enabling conditions disappear.”
Common Roots, Different Paths - NUS and UM
Hena Mukherjee & Poh Kam Wong
In their characterization of world-class research universities (Salmi 2009; Altbach and Balan 2007), the central features are their standing as research institutions internationally and their responsibility in creating new knowledge relative to the growth of the knowledge economy with science and technological innovation at its core, linking higher education to the requirements of economic growth. In analyzing two institutions to unravel the intertwining variables which lead to the making of such world class universities, this paper reviews the paths taken by two universities which branched out from the same roots – the National University of Singapore and the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Today there are four and twenty-four public universities in Singapore and Malaysia respectively.
In the last decade, the THES-QS World University Rankings showed NUS among the world’s top 20 (2004, 2005, 2006) and 30 (2008) while rankings for UM moved progressively lower between the same period of time from 89 to 230 These results led to public questioning in Malaysia about the perceived declining standards of UM with calls for action. In this paper, we review the two universities’ common origin; their missions post-independence; the thrust of the secondary school system in preparing students for tertiary education; their strategies for institutional management, nurturing undergraduate and postgraduate students, and academic staffing; policies regarding internationalization of students and faculty; and their inter-connections with global advances. The paper attempts to draw lessons from the experiences of the two universities to share with the global academic community.
COMMON ROOTS
Both the National University of Singapore and the University of Malaya had their roots in Singapore with the establishment of King Edward VII College of Medicine in 1905. The University of Malaya was established in October 1949 in Singapore as an outcome of a merger between the King Edward VII Medical College and Raffles College. It went on to become a key player in creating trained and specialized human resources for the then Federation of Malaya and Singapore. Growth and expansion of the university, coupled with independence (Malaya in 1957; Singapore in 1959) as two separate countries, led to the creation of two branches in 1959, one in Singapore and one in Kuala Lumpur. In 1962, following the decision of the Singapore and Malayan governments (Malaysia was formed in 1963 with the addition of Sabah and Sarawak states in Borneo), the two Divisions became autonomous national universities – the University of Singapore and the University of Malaya – in their respective countries. The University of Singapore in 1980 merged with Nanyang University to become the National University of Singapore.
The populations served in both countries are multiracial with the same racial mix in different proportions. The island-state of Singapore supports 4.8 million people, 77% of which are Chinese, 14% Malays, 8% Indians and 1% others. Malaysia’s 28 million comprises 65% Malays and other indigenous peoples (known as Bumiputeras), 26% Chinese, 8% Indians and about 1% others (all percentages rounded off). The plurality of races is particularly significant to Malaysia where education policy is colored by differential opportunities relative to entrance to universities and access to financial aid.
DIFFERENT MISSIONS
Mission statements of both universities had very different emphases. For NUS, being on the cutting edge of teaching and research continued to be a priority over the decades. At the University of Malaya, the implementation of the National Economic Policy was paramount with special rights and privileges for the Bumiputra population in terms of student quotas, more relaxed admission criteria, easy access to financial support from government agencies, additional pathways to admission, more favorable and less competitive recruitment and promotion criteria for academic staff. These policies worked to reduce the overall talent pool at a period of the university’s development when it had to compete with a number of newer universities for financing. Unfortunately, UM, the erstwhile premier university, was also unable to provide timely support in terms of strategic innovations and production when the economic competition from countries such as China,South Korea and Taiwan revealed that unless Malaysia was able to bring high, value-added technology to industry, she would be unable to hold her own. The time for resting on the advantage of low cost labor ended particularly when China’s cheap labor force entered into the market place.
To juxtapose the two institutions, as NUS kept pace with the demands of a growing economy which sought to be competitive nationally and internationally, with English continuing as the language of instruction and research, UM became more inward looking, with lecture notes increasingly becoming the new texts as proficiency in English declined and reluctance of students to use English texts and journals grew.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY AND THE STATE
Both universities were established based on the British university model of academic governing structure with Faculties, Senates and Councils (currently known as the Board of Trustees in NUS and the Board of Directors in UM) with teaching, research and community participation and service providing the framework of transaction. Links between the universities and government have always been very close: until the seventies they were the major providers of specialized human resources in both countries.
NUS developed in a political and economic environment which stated unequivocally that human capital development was the foremost goal of a country that was scarce in other natural resources. Its national educational development policies (see e.g. Low et. al. 1991) were squarely based on meritocracy and the need for graduates who could enhance Singapore’s growth as a hub for international financial services and trade.
Between 1962 and the present, NUS has had 5 Vice-Chancellors, contrasting with 10 for UM, where many served for single tenures of three years, and at least two did not complete their first tenures. Interviews with senior faculty and managers from both universities lead to the conclusion that VCs should: be identified by a carefully selected search committee which will use rigorous terms of reference as a guide; possess a strong academic reputation nationally and internationally; be in position for not less than two terms so that there is continuity in policy and implementation; ordinarily not be a member of the civil service; and be provided managerial autonomy in decision-making on academic matters based on the mission and goals of the university, notwithstanding the fact that it is incumbent upon a public university to adhere to formal government administrative procedures
In Malaysia, the University and Colleges Act was introduced in 1971 to provide the Minister of Education with the general direction of higher education development and management. The Act was launched following demonstrations by a segment of the student body and some staff at UM, demanding that the government address the issue of poverty. All Vice-Chancellors and Deans were appointed by the Ministry and indeed the management and administration of universities had a central hub in MoE’s Higher Education Department. In the eighties, at least one VC was a civil servant seconded to run the academic institution fortwo terms.
Government agencies, particularly Ministries of Education (Singapore) and Higher Education (Malaysia) traditionally have significant control over a range of decisions in the two universities. In Malaysia,included in the range are decisions influencing: the appointment of Vice-Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors, Registrar and Deans; approvals for new programs and course offerings; the identification of external examiners for examinations and promotions to full professorships. Bucking this pattern, the new (October 2008) UM Vice Chancellor has instituted a number of reforms such as election processes for Deans in 2009, a practice which four out of twelve faculties took up. The remaining 8 faculties were unable to muster the three eligible nominations required to conduct elections.
In the case of NUS, there has been a progressive shift towards greater autonomy in the appointment of senior university management over the years, particularly after the corporatization of the university in 2006 (see below). Practices in line with those of leading universities overseas were also progressively instituted,for example, the recruitment of deans and department heads through international search committees.
In both universities, the internal managerial and administrative ethos has reflected that of the government/civil service. As public institutions, they have both been subject to government regulations where administrators are government appointees and academic staff no different from other government employees. Subject to government processes of implementation and coordination, the universities persisted with their bureaucratic work processes not always supportive of more responsive approaches. In the initialyears, the focus was on the teaching function, and as their eco nomies grew, the watchword was that of absorbing and diffusing new technologies, rather than stimulating locally-grown innovations and the creation of new knowledge. However, from the 1980s, there has been a shift in policy from pursuing the primary role of teaching to a policy of pursuing both teaching and research. As seen later in the paper, the policy shift to encompass a significant role in research has been implemented with greater resource intensity and outcome in NUS than in UM.
CORPORATIZATION
By the 1990s, as both universities evolved to become large, comprehensive research universities with a concomitant increase in the complexity of governance, the government in both nations began to review the relationships between state and university, leading to the eventual corporatization of both universities.However, the actual process of implementation of corporatization turned out to be quite different.In 1997, the Corporatization of Higher Education Act was passed by the Malaysian government and it revealed that there had been some re-thinking about the government’s role in higher education. This would allow universities to run themselves like corporate bodies, independent of civil procedures, minimizing bureaucratic red tape which causes delays in the decision-making process and the response rate of institutions to the changing socio-economic needs of society. It took almost two decades to realize but the legislative framework regarding the enhancing of university autonomy is yet to be fully implemented. This has prevented UM (and other Malaysian universities except for Universiti Sains Malaysia designated in 2008 as the ‘apex’ university) from enrolling the best-qualified students, the most competent and qualified academic and research staff through competitive compensation packages, and independent authority to appoint highly competent leaders In contrast, in the case of Singapore, the issue of corporatization of higher education was not on the policy agenda until the mid-2000s, when a University Autonomy, Governance and Funding (UAGF)
Steering Committee was established by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in 2005 to develop specific recommendations for possible corporatization of NUS. The recommendations were swiftly adopted by the MOE and a Bill of Parliament was passed in early 2006 to pave the way for NUS to be given greater autonomy and to begin operating as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee from April 1, 2006. A Board of Trustees (BOT) was established to oversee NUS as a corporatized entity, and within a year, the corporatization process has for all intents and purposes been completed.
TRANSFORMATION PROCESSES
Singapore In terms of transformation from a traditional institution producing skilled managerial and technical human resources (which was the original underlying mission of both NUS and UM) to a complex global player contributing to the development of the knowledge economy steeped in innovative science and technology-based solutions in support of national, regional and international economic growth, the National University of Singapore is well ahead based on productivity which is captured by world rankings of research (see below). The Singapore government quickly realized the role universities have in sustaining economic growth and in the early seventies, the ’labor-intensive strategy gradually gave way to a higher value technology-intensive strategy…..a new tertiary education philosophy crystallized in Singapore’ (Seah 1983, 14).
In terms of strategic planning, NUS had in the early eighties followed the policy of capping places in traditional courses to allow for growth prospects for professional courses such as Engineering, Architecture, Building and Real Estate Management. Prevailing government policies related to high-level manpower requirements continued to influence university admissions as did the outcomes of constant monitoring of market forces to reduce risks of graduate unemployment. Tight financial control of the budget was also instituted by the Ministry through financial contributions and its representation on university council.
The greater autonomy post-2006 enabled NUS to accelerate the process of organizational transformation that she has already embarked on since the late 1990s to better meet the challenge of global competition. For example, although NUS had already started to offer more competitive compensation packages to recruit faculty from overseas before 2006, corporatization gave the university greater flexibility in structuring the offer, including the provision of generous start-up research grants and reduced teaching loads in initial years for top researchers. In making the switch of faculty tenure term from age 55 to 65 for new hires, NUS has also been progressively raising the bar for tenure in her drive for greater e excellence.
In addition, NUS also implemented a one-off exercise to selectively offer the tenure extension only to existing faculty that she intends to retain, thus making it easier for the university to transit to a higher level of excellence.
Malaysia In UM, as in other public universities in Malaysia, the inability to take academic, professional,financial and technical decisions autonomously has been a canker in its growth, and has certainly retarded its capacity to be internationally competitive, mired in its own bureaucracy. Prior to 2002, all new courses and programs had to be cleared at the Faculty level, then at Senate followed by the University Council. Since Council has senior Ministry of Higher Education representatives (MoHE), and since the university is financially dependent on the government, it is really the government nod that holds sway. This is true also for senior academic appointments. After 2002, the Quality Assurance Division was set up in MoHE who assumed the clearance/approval function, a task after 2007 taken on by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency under which the Quality Assurance Division is subsumed. It is highly centralized and still resides within the core of the Ministry, which has the last word, but there are efforts by MQA to have better benchmarking and monitoring practices.
Referring to the ‘approval’ by the cabinet on education for a new ethnic relations module to be taught in all public universities, a matter which should be resolved by the academic community, a senior academic and politician commented: ‘Unfortunately, for some time university autonomy has been systematically eroded in Malaysia. University of Malaya which enjoyed a certain autonomy during its early days has now joined younger universities that are directly controlled or strongly influenced by the government. Basic freedoms of university staff and students have been so effectively curbed…It is not surprising, therefore, that the quality and standards of local universities have been deteriorating’ (Ali 2009, p. 266).
While organizational structures have expanded in UM, with increased number of faculties, institutes and centers, inadequate attention has been paid to their efficient management. There is a dearth of able non-academic support staff to help co-ordinate, administer the various services, and assist with the increasing burden of student and staff records and information. Similarly, well-trained and skilled technicians are not always available for the efficient management of expensive laboratories and equipment.
UM Reforms from within Efforts have started recently in UM to help put the university on track. They reflect an internal realignment with the policies and practices of successful research universities. Since coming on board in late 2008 from a successful new private sector university, the Vice Chancellor (VC) of UM has drawn up an agenda of performance targets for academic and research staff, focusing on developing a culture of scholarship. The program of change is in two phases. In the first phase, the VC, seeing himself as the manager as well as the academic leader of the institution, reviewed each faculty’s inputs and outputs, and drew up a set of performance targets for academic staff.
Taking the overall low productivity into account as well as international benchmarking information,Phase two saw the VC, assisted by his three Deputies, visit each faculty to explain the process of performance target setting; review the targets themselves inviting well-justified suggestions for modification; setting a realistic timeline for achieving these objectives; and providing information on rewards and incentives (largely financial). Differential outputs are stipulated for the various levels of positions in terms of:ISI-ranked publications (for which there are financial incentives); supervision of doctoral and masters’ students; supervision of research students; success in obtaining research funds; minimum teaching performance scores (based on student evaluation); completion of consultancies, positions as experts or resource persons; and satisfactory contribution to administrative work as required by faculty/departmental responsibilities. One of the revolutionary changes being put in place, and causing some discomfort, is that with five top tier ISI publications a higher degree candidate wins a PhD degree without submitting a dissertation.
Understanding the pragmatic difficulties of bringing about transformation in institutional culture, the university has identified ways in which academic staff can be assisted in meeting targets. For example,editorial assistance would be provided from the Vice Chancellor’s office to those who need assistance in English Language; in translating articles from Bahasa Malaysia to English; and providing more time for research and publication activities by reducing teaching hours. The current leadership, in a bid to improve accountability and overall governance across the university, is building transparency into administrative procedures such as promotion of staff, criteria for promotion, selection and evaluation information of internal and external academic assessors through disclosing all such information on the university electronic network.
FINANCING
While the Singapore Government’s financial commitment to education has stayed at about the same proportion – around 3% – of its GDP since 1962, the proportion of public educational expenditure going to university education has climbed from 10.8% to 19.8% between 1962 and 2007. In absolute terms, this amounts to S$1,49 billion (USD1: S1.44) approximately for 2007, indicating quite clearly that all three universities have a strong base of government financial resources. The annual operating budget for NUS in 2008 reached S$1.37 billion, up from just S$328 million in 1990 (NUS Annual Reports, various years).
In 2004, Malaysia allocated 2.7% of her GDP for expenditure on tertiary education (includes universities and polytechnics). This figure compares well with countries in the region and with OECD countries as well but it should be noted that the allocation reflects tuition subsidies and on-campus accommodation. Education regularly receives around 24% of the annual budget.
In the past budget proposals were based on student enrollments with small annual increases. It was very much a negotiated system. In 1997, the Government of Malaysia introduced the Modified Budgeting System with the aim of developing a budget allocation system which would be output oriented. Unfortunately, this has not worked and budgets continue to be negotiated without reference to output measures
RESEARCH ALLOCATIONS
Indicative of NUS’ growing emphasis on research in recent years, the amount of research expenditure by NUS has increased more than threefold in the last decade, from S$102 mil. in 1997 to S$366 mil. in 2007.Relative to the total operating expenses of the university, research spending has increased from about 12% in 2000 to over 27% in 2007. The bulk of the research spending is in engineering and medicine, with an increasing proportion going to the latter in line with the growing emphasis on biomedical sciences in Singapore’s national R&D strategy in recent years (NUS Annual Reports, various years).
By designating four research universities (currently there are 24 public universities) – University of Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia –MoHE ‘s expectation is that concentrating resources in institutions with most potential will pay better dividends than spreading them thinly. This provides UM an additional MYR100 million annually (UDS1:MYR3.45). These allocations are beginning to be tied to performance targets. Before 2005, research allocations for all public universities amounted to MYR9 million, with fairly insignificant amounts for each university.
As UM markets itself more aggressively, there are signs of success in terms of accessing funds as well as from the private sector and international organizations (a Faculty of Medicine team recently received won a grant for HIVAids from WHO). Approved government R&D Grant allocations between 2005 to 2008 moved upwards from MYR8.5 million to MYR126.9 million. Grants from private industry and international sources did not show stable growth, however, over the same period. In 2005, it amounted to MYR 2.4million in approved allocations, moving to MYR5.2million for 2006, plunging down to MYR885,635 only in 2007, and increasing to MYR1.2million in 2008. [ Information on research expenditures awaited] The instability and low levels of research funding in UM contrasts with stable and growing resources for research in Singapore,an issue which is critical if universities are to keep in step with new fields of inquiry and global advances in knowledge.
SCHOOLING AND PREPAREDNESS FOR TERTIARY EDUCATION
The quality of universities depends on the quality of its students. In this section, the paper looks selectively at the school system paying special heed to secondary schooling in preparation for university.
International testimony to the Singapore pre-university education system is borne out by the country’s repeated successful performance in TIMSS Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) – for example, among 13-years olds, Singapore was ranked top in both Mathematics and Science in the TIMSS cycles of 1995 and 2003, and third and first respectively in the most recent cycle (2007). School curriculum in Singapore is regularly reviewed and revised, the ‘A’ level curriculum in 2007 being a case in point, which broadens a student’s choice of options and permutations for examinations. A new subject,‘Knowledge and Inquiry’, was designed to expose students to the construction and nature of knowledge,creating the need to cut across disciplines. To gain acceptance into university, students must pass ‘Knowledge and Inquiry’ or the ‘ ‘General Paper’, a paper that tests general knowledge. About 25% of the A-level cohort gain seats in one of Singapore’s three universities.
In Malaysia, as in Singapore, all government-funded schools follow a centralized, common curriculum which lead to common examinations. Secondary education in national schools is conducted in the Malay language except for Mathematics and Science since 2003. However, these subjects will revert to being taught fully in Malay by 2012 on the grounds that rural children are disadvantaged if English is used. Malaysia participated in the TIMSS eighth-grade assessment in 1999 (28 countries), 2003 (44 countries) and 2007 (49).In eighth grade Mathematics, Malaysia’s average score had declined steadily from 519 in 1999 to 474 in 2007, falling below the average TIMSS score of 500 for all participating countries in 2007. In eighth grade science, Malaysia’s average score increased from 492 in 1999 to 510 in 2003, but fell to 471 in 2007. In 2007,Malaysia’s average scores in mathematics and science remained significantly behind those of Singapore (474 vs. 593 and 471 vs. 567 respectively) and other East Asian NIEs.
PERPECTIVES ON SCHOOL-LEVEL LEARNING IN MALAYSIA
A longitudinal study on the transition from school to work (Nagaraj et al. 2009) of students across the education system from primary through tertiary concluded that the public education system has ‘in large measure been responsible for a ‘memory-based learning designed for the average student’ system of education rather than a system that stimulates and fosters creative thinking and excellence (Ministry of Education, 1997, p. 9). The team’s analysis of data also pointed out that the system fosters the fear of providing the ‘wrong’ answer, promoting in general conformity and uniformity rather than fresh and creative thinking, with rote learning and memorization appearing to be the key factor for success in examinations (Wong, 2004, p. 159-160). Rote learning, memorization, uniformity, and conformity foster risk-aversion but not the development of creative thinkers (The Economist, 2000). These findings do not augur well for tertiary education entrants expected to fulfill Malaysia’s plans for graduating high-performing researchers-in-waiting.
MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION
While mother tongue instruction is available within the Singapore school system, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew developed the idea of English as a common language that both connected citizens of all ethnic backgrounds, and tied Singapore to the world economy. Apart from mother tongue, at secondary school level, students can opt to study French, German or Japanese. The attention to international languages is further supported by the Ministry of Education Language Centre which provides free language education for most additional languages that schools do not cover. Providing such a range of languages while keeping English language as the medium of instruction prepares graduates well for international participation in the future.
In Malaysia, Bahasa Malaysia has been the medium of instruction at school and university level since the seventies, posing obstacles for university students, particularly Malay students from rural schools and Chinese students from secondary Chinese-medium schools (there are around 60) in the use of texts and journals in English. With policies of internationalization of faculty and students, English Language proficiency becomes an issue. Post graduate programs, however, have always been available in English, with students having the choice of writing examinations in English or Malay. Over the last five years, English has been available for instructional purposes at undergraduate level but the uptake is poor as students have been schooled in Malay. The recent government decision to revert to Bahasa Malaysia by 2012 for secondary school science and mathematics which had been taught in English the past seven years is confusing in light of the widespread discussion on the necessity to produce school and university graduates who are fluent in English; and the need to graduate more students who can participate in international-level research and innovation activities. One of UM’s Pro-Chancellors recently emphasized that ‘…(English) is the lingua franca of the knowledge and innovation economy. ..Every possible teaching-learning method should be employed to enhance English proficiency for all learners’ (Shah, 2009). Unless strong political measures support the widespread use of English, the level of internationalization will be limited. Proficiency in English is not up for debate in NUS and this has served its international objectives well.
STUDENT ADMISSION & NURTURING OF STUDENTS AT NUS
NUS has traditionally admitted students at the end of the 12 years of schooling based on their A-level examination results. Polytechnics graduates are also admitted for both full time as well as part-time courses.While the cut-offs for qualification to various faculties vary due to their popularity, there has been a general trend of increasing stringency over the years for courses that are high in demand such as medicine, law and business.
In 2003, NUS implemented a new system for undergraduate admission, adopting a more holistic approach. Apart from their academic grades, students’ intellectual attributes such as reasoning ability and critical thinking, as well as personal characteristics such as leadership, commitment and talent are taken into consideration through the incorporation of Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) 1 Scores and Core Curricula Activities bonus points in the admission decision. Faculties are also allowed to reserve a certain percentage of places for candidates who excel in other areas beyond academic grades.
Student enrollment in NUS grew steadily from 2,149 undergraduate and graduate students in 1962 to 4708 in 1970, 9078 in 1980, 17,535 in 1990, and 29,761 in 2000 (NUS Annual Reports, various years). Since 2000, the total student enrollment has been relatively stable, reaching 30,350 in 2008 and is expected to stay about the same in the near future. While undergraduates dominated in the early years (about 95% of total enrollment in the period 1962-70), the proportion of graduate students had increased steadily over the years,reaching over 23% in 2008, with a long-term target of one-third. Student/teaching faculty ratio climbed from 11:1 in 1980 to a peak of 17.8 in 2000, before coming down to 14.4 in 2008. The ratio for students/teaching and research staff was 10:1 in 1990 coming down to 8:1 in 2008, consistent with the university’s objective of inducting students effectively into research.
The distribution of students among faculties has changed over the years, reflecting the changing manpower demand of the Singapore economy. Between 1970 and 2008, the share of student enrollment in engineering increased the most, from around 14% to around 27% at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Medicine, on the other hand, experienced a steadily declining enrollment share, from 27% to 5.6% for undergraduates and 47% to 8% for graduates. In the Arts and Social Sciences the proportion of undergrads remained steadily around 20% over the same period, but its share of graduate enrollment had declined from 25% in 1970 to 10% in 2008.
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF STUDENTS
While the primary mission of NUS in the initial years was to provide access to higher education to the local population, this has gradually been transformed to take on the broader role of attracting foreign talents to Singapore by the late 1990s, in line with the national strategy to promote immigration of highly skilled foreign talents to supplement the limited supply of local manpower. In addition, recognizing that education itself can be a major export industry, the Singapore government has by the late 1990s established a strategic program to turn the island economy into a leading educational hub in Asia — the Boston of the East. Besides allowing the local universities to increase the intake of foreign students, the government had set a goal of bringing 10 leading universities around the world to establish major operational presence in Singapore (Olds,2007).
In addition to contributing to this national development goal, the internationalization of the student body at NUS is also necessitated by the need to increase the supply of research talents to help support the research drive of the university, as well as being recognized as crucial to inject the diversity of experiences and international exposure of local students. Singapore has a distinctive advantage in attracting foreign students,given the use of English as the medium of instruction and the cosmopolitan nature of the society. Theproportion of international students among undergraduates and graduates in NUS reached 14.8% and 53.9% respectively in 2005, and increased further to 22.3% and 57.2 % by 2008. Overall, by 2008, over 10,500, or 34.6% of NUS’ student body are made up of international students. In addition, the number of international exchange students in NUS had also been on the rise, reaching nearly 1300 in 2008.
TEACHING & LEARNING
Much attention is given by NUS to the nurturing of students with experiential learning that exposes the students to industrial practices, research engagement, and international socialization. This is evident from various educational program innovations introduced over the years. For example, the Talent Development Programme (TDP) was established in 1996 to provide students with intellectual and academic potential with the opportunities to pursue enhanced or specialised courses through independent study and research in chosen fields of study, within their own faculties. In 1999, a Core Curriculum Programme (CCP), modeled after Harvard’s CCP, was launched to provide a broad-based education with an emphasis on writing and critical thinking, and an appreciation of the connections between different disciplines. In July 2001, a new University Scholars Program (USP) was incepted as a fusion of these two programmes to provide greater curriculum flexibility to talented students who want to pursue a more inter-disciplinary education. A campus-wide Minor Program was also introduced in the early 2000s to encourage students to develop a more rounded education beyond their core discipline.
International exchange program has been actively promoted by NUS to broaden the mindset and exposure of NUS students. This emphasis went beyond the normal one semester/academic year exchanges with a wide range of universities around the world to developing distinctive programs that give NUS a differentiating edge. For example, a partnership program with MIT was initiated in 1998 to enable top NUS graduate students (together with students from another university in Singapore, Nanyang Technological University) in cutting edge engineering and life science fields to take courses conducted by both NUS and MIT faculties, and to conduct research supervised by faculties from both universities. Besides the use of videoconferencing lecturing, NUS students in the program spend one semester to one year at MIT. The program was so successful that it evolved from being an NUS-degree only program to become a joint-degree program. In 2000, a new experiential learning program called the NUS Overseas College (NOC) program was launched to allow NUS undergraduate students with entrepreneurial interests to work as interns in high tech start-ups in Silicon Valley for one year while taking entrepreneurship classes at Stanford. The NOC program has since been extended to 5 other high tech hubs in the world, including Stockholm (partnering KTH) and Beijing (partnering Tsinghua).
Besides innovating new educational programs, NUS has also emphasized the development of her teaching infrastructure and pedagogy. In particular, NUS has invested heavily in IT infrastructure to support education, including the development of an advanced Learning Management System (LMS) called IVLE (Interactive Virtual Learning Environment) to support ubiquitous e-learning; the system has subsequently been commercialized through a spin-off company. An Outstanding Educator Award program has been instituted since 2000 to recognize and encourage teaching excellence and pedagogical innovation. More recently, NUS has also set up an education think-tank – the NUS Teaching Academy – which has the objective of helping ‘to drive NUS to new heights of excellence, and play a critical role in shaping the university’s policies and directions in action’. (Knowledge Enterprise, May-June 2009). The eighteen members of the Academy are former recipients of the Outstanding Educator Award whose responsibility it is to drive new educational thinking and serve as mentors.
The ability to identify and implement such innovative educational programs to induct students not only into the world of research and industrial application but also to develop in the students the spirit of enterprise,a global mindset and an aspiration for excellence, is a mark of NUS senior management’s pro-active focus on improving the quality of her educational experience, both to better prepare her graduates to meet the increasingly complex demand of the job market, as well as to build a reputation for educational innovation as a differentiation factor in the global competition for talented students.
STUDENT ADMISSION & NURTURING OF STUDENTS AT UM
Unlike Singapore, in terms of admission requirements, Malaysian universities have five pathways to access public university education. The track open to all is that of the Malaysian Higher School Certificate gained at the end of 13 years of primary, secondary and higher secondary education. The UK-based “A” level examination is also open to all but not taken by many. In keeping with the overall NEP-based affirmative action policies, other pathways to university admission exist primarily for Bumiputera students. At the end of eleven years of schooling, bumiputera students who receive their Sijil Tinggi Pelajaran Malaysia (Malaysian School Certificate) may be admitted to a year-long matriculation program leading to university admission;2-year Foundation studies leading to admission; and Higher Religious Certification. Admission to university depends on their performance in these examinations, and for UM the current requirement is a Cumulative Grade Point Average of 3.0 out of 4. The issue however is that the CGPA from different pre-university programs represent different levels of achievement, and selection criteria usually favor matriculation program graduates.
The upshot of these several pathways is that they expand access but public institutions like UM would like to admit the very best. University admissions are centrally organized by an admissions center under the Ministry of Higher Education. (For the first time in 2009, University Sains Malaysia, deemed to be the ‘apex’ university since July 2008, has handled its own admissions process.) Anecdotal evidence suggests that the high failure rate among first-year medicine and dentistry students is attributed to the students who have entered through matriculation programs. Unless UM can take control of its admission policies, it will be unable to select the best applicants.
POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR MALAYSIAN TERTIARY EDUCATION ADMISSION POST-1970
Central to understanding the underlying reasons for many of the policies and practices in Malaysia discussed in this paper is the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The civil disturbances of 1969, partly the result of dissatisfaction among the Bumiputeras (Malays and other indigenous groups) with their progress in the education and economic sectors, brought about sweeping changes leading to the NEP.The Policy was designed to achieve national integration and unity through a two-pronged strategy of (i) eradicating poverty by raising income levels and increasing employment opportunities for all Malaysians and (ii) restructuring Malaysian society to correct economic imbalances so as to reduce and eventually eliminate the identification of race with economic function. Education was perceived as a vital instrument in achieving the objectives of the NEP. Student enrollment should reflect the ethnic composition of the country; more scholarships were to be provided to Bumiputera students; more weightage was to be given for admission to students from rural areas; the use of the Malay language was to be accelerated to be fully implemented in the entire education system by 1983; special schools were set up for rural children; and greater opportunities were provided to Bumiputera students to study science.
Within the framework of the NEP, the higher education system gradually diversified to meet the demands of an evolving economy. Enrollment in all public higher education institutions, including UM, in the sixties and seventies was heavily concentrated in the social sciences and humanities. In 1970, a total of 65% of the total student enrollment were in these two disciplines, 30% were in science and 5% in technology. Thisemphasis was due partly to the colonial past, the lower cost of establishing and developing such disciplines,and the pull of employment opportunities in the expanding state bureaucracy. However, an oversupply of graduates skewed in the liberal arts was viewed as inappropriate for a complex modern economy and a gradual change was then effected.
By 1995 it also became clear that to maintain Malaysia’s economic ompetitiveness, and hold its own among countries in the region, China and India, she would have to strategize and develop technological and innovation capabilities. This implied that tertiary institutions would have to re-think their priorities and their research and innovation strategies. A major strategic change implemented in 2003 was to drop ethnic group quotas introduced in 1970 but curiously this has not changed the distribution of students by race overall.
Student enrollment data for UM available from 1971 onwards show that between 1971 and 1991,overall enrollment at undergraduate level moved from 8,545 in 1971 to 9,418 in 1991. By 1995, the enrollment in the Arts and Social Sciences had shrunk to 57% and that of science to 27%, while enrollment in technology-based disciplines had expanded to 16%. By 2001, however this figure had more than doubled,reaching 22,384 but decreased to 17,797 in 2007 and to 14,482 for the 2009/2010 intake. This reduction reflects UM’s plan to increase the proportion of graduate students, working towards a target of post-graduate to undergraduate students at 50%: 50%. Student/faculty ratio targets as set up by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency are 25:1 for Arts; 15:1 for sciences; and 4:1 for clinical programs.
The distribution of students over time by area of study is germane to UM’s aspirations of becoming a research university of repute. Of the total number of entrants (9,006) in 1971, almost 50% were enrolled in the Arts and Social Sciences Faculty, reduced to about 10% in 2008. For Engineering the share increased from 5.6% to 12% and for medicine this stayed around 7% and 8%. For Science undergraduate enrollment share over the same period was 17% and 16.2%. The increases in Engineering, Medicine and maintaining Science enrollment share illustrates, to some extent, the trend of increasing the proportion of science and technology-based students as a strategy to move towards a research and innovation based campus culture.
TEACHING AND LEARNING
Student campus life from the seventies to the nineties was classroom and examination-based, with few campus activities and interactions. Following the 1969 race riots, the Universities and Colleges Act1 was promulgated in 1971, which brought all the 4 (?) universities at the time under the Ministry of Education, all losing their autonomous status[1]. For students it meant a serious curb on campus activities including the functioning of student societies. Race-based groupings increased and is still very much a campus feature.While some improvements are evident, students interviewed in 2005 had the following views. Considerable racial polarization existed, evidenced in membership of extra-curricular clubs; teaching approach was didactic, especially in the social sciences; questionable if academic programs fostered work-related skills;professors were not open about personal opinions; limited opportunities to participate in research activities, conferences and scholarly gatherings as undergraduates; complicated bureaucracy which governed every action; IT’s campus penetration should be strongly enhanced; no choice in language of instruction, would prefer English as this was a common academic language; no follow-up with students complaints; and there were limited opportunities to interact with international students (World Bank 2007, 52-53).
In the last four years much has been accomplished to reinvigorate the curriculum, opening it out to become more relevant to global needs. Inputs from external assessors, industry liaison panels, employers and students themselves are making a difference to curriculum design and review. With monitoring and program accreditation by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency which takes international benchmarks into account,UM appears to be moving in the right direction.
STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAMS
Reports for the years 2004 to 2008 on student’s internationally-oriented activities revealed that these were usually limited to sports and recreation activities and limited to about one or two visits a year. Exchange programs for students started in a fairly desultory fashion five years ago but has recently been formally established with 25% of each cohort participating in student exchange programs abroad with one of UM’s 129 partner universities. However, the presence of international exchange students in UM is minimal compared with an average of 1,000 annually in NUS between 2005 and 2008.
GRADUATE ENROLLMENT
Graduate students in 1971 numbered 461 with PhD students constituting almost 15% with the largest number of doctoral students from the Arts and Social Sciences. In 1971 Arts doctoral students constituted33.8% (23) of all PhD students with Engineering at 4.4% (3), and Science at 25% (17). By 2008, with total doctoral students at 2246, Arts students made up almost 10% of doctoral candidates, with Engineering at above 9% (211), and Science at almost 14% (312). The total number of Masters and PhD candidates in 2008 stood at 9,599 or 35% of the total student population, a far cry from the 461 in 1971, and an indication of UM working towards its goal of developing and increasing research and innovation skills in the university. While absolute numbers have moved upwards in Science and Engineering, in proportion to the total number enrolled in doctoral programs, UM’s development of skills in strategic research areas has some way to go.
MEETING NEP MANDATES
UM has successfully fulfilled the mandates of the New Economic Policy, putting in place policies,structures and procedures to expand access for Bumiputera students as part of the nation’s poverty reduction campaign. Bumiputera students including students from the lower income states on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia and the states of Sabah and Sarawak in East Malaysia on the island of Borneo have steadily increased their participation in UM since 1970 to the present, constituting about 60% of the student body. University leadership has had mainly Bumiputeras at the helm since 1995 and this is also true for the 1.majority of faculties, institutes and centers. The logical corollary to these considered policies is that affirmative action has worked. To the extent that these policies have been embedded in the system, the talent pool of the institution from which top notch scholars and researchers could have emerged has shrunk considerably over the years. If UM is able to carry out its new policies, which appear to be newly directed to the most able irrespective of race or nationality, then it has the potential to recover some ground lost over the last few decades.
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF STUDENTS
With the burgeoning of the knowledge economy, and low capacity to keep abreast with such changes,importing foreign talent is seen as not just a temporary solution but a way to maintain material links with global research and knowledge creation. UM had been somewhat slower in internationalizing its student body, compared with NUS. Since the focus of UM’s mission for about three decades has been the implementation of the NEP, the policy of internationalization became a priority only in recent years in response to the profile this characteristic has in world rankings. While international students made up 22.3% of all undergraduate students and 57.2 % of all graduate students in NUS in 2008, the corresponding figures for UM in 2007 was only 12.3%, and these were largely at post-graduate rather than undergraduate level.Apart from the strong international reputation NUS enjoys, its offers of subsidies for tuition and accommodation are attractive to the best qualified who have a large array of choices as is the fact that English is the medium of instruction and the language of official transaction and discourse, which gives it a distinct edge. UM tends to attract students from a number of developing countries, particularly Islamic countries. Currently the top ten countries with the largest number of students enrolled, starting with the highest, include Iran, Indonesia, China, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Thailand.
DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC FACULTY IN NUS
In line with the strategic goal to make NUS a globally competitive university, the NUS senior administration had steadily been raising the bar over the years in terms of academic faculty recruitment and retention, with the process greatly accelerated since the late 1990s. The key policy instruments include progressive raising of salary and compensation packages, and making them more flexible and performance-based, so as to be more competitive internationally especially for the top talents; increasing the level of research funding support and provision of research facilities/infrastructure; relentlessly raising the threshold for promotion and tenure; and increasing the flexibility of faculty time allocation, including reduced teaching workloads for faculty with excellent research track records to devote more time to research.
The steadily improving quality of NUS faculty can be measured using a number of proxy indicators.Firstly, the proportion of faculty with PhDs had increased substantially over the years; by 2005, 99% of the engineering faculty had PhDs, vs. only 50% in 1970, while for Science, Arts and Social Sciences and Business, the proportion with PhDs by 2003 were 88.7%, 80.2% and 79.8% respectively. For professional schools like medicine, design and architecture and law, the increase was more gradual due to the nature of professional practice.
Secondly, and more tellingly, the average research productivity and quality of NUS faculty have both increased considerably over the last two decades. The number of SCI/SSCI-indexed engineering publications by NUS increased 25 times from an average of 37 per year over 1981-83 to 941 per year over 2001-03, while that for medicine increased nearly ten-folds (62 to 602), and economics/business 4.5 times (from 20 to 90).The quality of the publications, as measured by average citations per publications in the following 3 years,also increased significantly – from 1.45 to 5.66 for engineering, 3.16 to 11.33 for medicine, and 0.32 to 6.36 for economics/business.
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF FACULTY AND RESEARCHERS
World class universities usually possess the characteristic of wooing and retaining strong faculty irrespective of nationality or race. While data for earlier years are not available, a comparison of NUS faculty composition between 1997 and 2005 shows a pattern of rapid increase of international staff both for the category of ‘faculty’ and ‘research’ staff’. In 1997, 61% of NUS’ 1,414 strong faculty members were Singaporeans compared with 48% in 2005 (Wong, Ho and Singh, 2009). Similarly in 1997, 29% of 843 research staff were Singaporeans compared with 21.3% in 2005. Other faculty members, in order of numbers,were from Malaysia, India, China, other Asian countries, US, Canada and others. The high presence of faculty from Malaysia in NUS (10.8% in 2005, down from 12.8% in 1997) reflects a larger phenomenon of net talent loss from Malaysia to Singapore since their political separation; indeed, as many Malaysians subsequently took up citizenship in Singapore, the actual contribution of Malaysian to the NUS faculty was probably higher than the above statistics suggest.
The above observation notwithstanding, it remains true that NUS has been diversifying its international sources of faculty recruitment in the last ten years, as the global competition for talents intensified. In particular, between 1997 and 2005, India and China contributed significantly increased number of both faculty and research staff. The number of Chinese faculty and research staff particularly increased quite markedly during this period. Faculty and research staff from China made up 4.5% and 32.2% respectively in 1997. In 2005, Chinese faculty were 6.9% of a complement of 1,765 members while Chinese research staff had a share of 42.4% of 1,087 research staff members. The policy of broadening the base of well-qualified faculty and researchers has stood NUS in good stead both in terms of the quantity and quality of research outputs, the density of international collaboration networks, and ultimately, world-class rankings.
DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC STAFF IN UM
A comparison with figures for UM over the years data are available, between 1970 and 2007, show the following picture emerging. Between 1971 and 1981, , the proportion of bumiputra staff rose, coupled with favorable training programs both locally and overseas for both categories of Bumipuera and non-Bumiputera but with significant larger numbers for the former. Based on the NEP, the policy of Bumiputera-ization did not pay special heed to identifying and retaining of talent among staff and graduate students, irrespective of race and nationality. This has damaged seriously the academic reputation of UM. More recently, particularly over the last 4 years, policies have changed to welcome talented researchers and teachers of any nationality to join the academic staff.
Staff size was 512 in 1970. It almost doubled by 1975 (with an average annual increase of 15.3%),reaching 1,372 by 1995. In 2001, it was 1,581 of which about 20% were of professorial grade. By 2007,academic staff size had increased to 2,035 but the number of professors had decreased to just above 15% (Source, Ministry of Higher Education, 2009). For the same year, 2007, about 50% of all academic staff were PhD holders, and assuming that professorships appointed held PhD degrees, the professors by this year were able to provide academic leadership. Compared with 37% staff with PhDs in 1999 (source: University of Malaya, Annual Report 1999), the steady increase in qualifications is a step in the right direction to improved teaching and research. An update for 2009 points out that currently 61% of faculty members have doctoral degrees, and this proportion rises to 75% (which is the target for PhD holders) when equivalents such as further degrees for medical faculty are included.
In a bid to accelerate improved quality of teaching and research, UM has made a PhD degree a requirement from lecturer-level upwards, with all faculties instructed to organize fortnightly seminars (a practice which was prevalent in many faculties about two decades ago) with compulsory participation. Similarly, a way has been devised to recruit staff who have proven themselves academically. This is the recently launched ‘Bright Sparks’ program, planned to facilitate research activities of talented post-graduate students, whether local or international, and is seen as a stepping stone to faculty appointments.
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF FACULTY
When the University of Singapore and the University of Malaya split in 1962, some of the existing expatriate staff stayed on in both the universities. However in the late sixties, under the policy of Malaysianization, many international staff (largely from the United Kingdom) left. Between 1971 and 1991,the number of international staff in UM decreased from 176 to about half the number. The government had also placed a restrictive ceiling of 5% at the time on the proportion of foreign nationals.
New academic programs and increased student numbers, particularly at post-graduate level, prompted university authorities to look outside Malaysia for expertise, intensified in recent years in response to the WCRU rankings which take international presence into account. In 2001 out of a total academic staff of 1,581, about 2% were foreign which by 2007 rose to about 14% out of a total of 2,035. By 2007, about 20% of international staff held professorships, and about 11% were Associate Professors. With almost 58% PhDs and in senior positions, international faculty’s ability to provide leadership in teaching and research could be progressively more significant. By 2008, out of 2,552 academic staff, international staff’s share was 21%.
Many of them were from South Asia and Southeast Asia with some from the Middle East and the majority tends to be in the sciences and engineering. UM has found it difficult to attract the best qualified and experienced international candidates both because, unlike NUS, it is unable to offer salaries that are internationally competitive nor a stellar research and innovation reputation to date. In Malaysia, only USM,as ‘apex’ university, has the independence to offer salaries that are not constrained by government caps.
Some international staff hired are offered a one-year probationary contract at the end of which decisions to renew or terminate are taken. From the perspective of the staff member, short-term contracts prevent them from giving of their best as they need to figure out next steps. In UM’s opinion, foreign staff need to prove themselves before they can be awarded longer term contracts. Clearly, some compromise will have to be made so that salaries can be more competitive to attract indisputably well qualified staff which may help with instituting more attractive contractual terms.
Nonetheless, interviews with senior faculty and administrators indicate that the proportion of international faculty will continue to increase for several reasons: lack of local expertise in key areas which have to be developed in terms of research and teaching; the thrust on research has sharpened the search for highly-qualified researchers, hence the casting of nets wide nationally and internationally; and on-going sensitivity to the fact that international presence in teaching (as well as among students) would contribute to improved world-class rankings.
DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF RESEARCH AT NUS
As highlighted in earlier section on financing, NUS has steadily increased her budget for R&D over the years, particularly in recent years. Concomitant with this increase in direct R&D expenditure has been an increased investment in R&D infrastructure. For example, NUS established linkage to international academic networks via a computer network called BITNET, becoming one of the first Asian countries to be on this network; subsequently, when internet took off, NUS was also among the first Asian universities to implement campus-wide access to internet. In 1989, NUS linked up with one of only two supercomputers in Singapore,enhancing the university’s role in the globalization of computing technology and skills. In 1991, NUS implemented NUSNET, a campus-wide optical fibre network, and in May 1995, the library became the first in the region to launch the full-text electronic document management and retrieval system.
NUS was also among the first universities in Asia to implement a technology licensing and industry liaison office (INTRO) to manage the university’s emerging intellectual property portfolio and industry R&D collaborations. Established in the early 1990s, INTRO had progressively put in place a system for managing invention disclosure and technology commercialization that is modeled after the best practice of leading universities in North America, for example, the implementation of standardized Research Collaborative Agreements (RCA) with external collaboration parties, the assignment of intellectual property ownership to the university, the adoption of fair distribution of licensing royalty income among the individual faculty,department and central administration to align interest in technology commercialization, and a policy of taking equity in lieu of royalty when an NUS technology is licensed to a spin-off founded by an NUS faculty or student. Driven by the rapid growth in research outputs and facilitated by the streamlined IP management support system, the number of research collaboration agreements, invention disclosures and patents granted to NUS increased rapidly since the early 2000s, with corresponding increase in technology licensing income.
The number of external RCAs increased from 109 over 1995-97 to 394 over 2005-07. The number of patents granted by the US patent office to NUS rose from 40 in the 1990-99 period to 204 in the 2000-08 period,while the number of licensing agreements increase from 60 to 198 in the corresponding period. Total licensing royalties also increased from S$335,000 in 1996-99 to S$3.3 million over 2003-08 (see Wong, Ho and Singh 2009 for more details).
In the early 2000s, as part of the new vision articulated by the then new vice-chancellor for NUS to become a “Global Knowledge Enterprise”, NUS has further expanded her technology commercialization support role by explicitly establishing a new organizational division called NUS Enterprise, to promote technology commercialization and entrepreneurship on a holistic basis. Reporting directly to the vice- chancellor/president, NUS Enterprise not only absorbed the INTRO functions into an expanded Industry Liaison Office (ILO), but also incorporated a university-level Entrepreneurship Centre that integrated the functions of entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurship promotion and outreach, and incubation support for NUS spin-offs (see Wong, Ho and Singh, 2007). The spin-off incubation support included not only the provision of physical incubation facilities, but also seed funding and mentoring by a network of experienced entrepreneurs and senior executives, and match-making of university start-ups with potential angel investors and venture capitalists. More than 70 university spin-offs by professors, students and recent alumni had been supported by the NUS Enterprise Incubator (NEI) since its inception in 2002, and while there had been no major commercial success yet, more than 10 such companies had received follow-on investment by external investors (see Wong, Ho and Singh 2009).
Development and Management of Research in UM
The Ninth Malaysia Plan (2006-2010) states that universities in Malaysia would aim to produce ‘world class human capital that is knowledgeable and highly skilled, flexible and creative as well as imbued with positive work ethics and spiritual values’ (Ninth Malaysia Development Plan 2006, 248-249). This period would also witness the creation of ‘universities of international standing and ensure that tertiary institutions meet the needs of employers’ (ibid. 249).In 2006, the Ministry of Higher Education in Malaysia took the step of identifying four of the country’s public institutions and designating them research universities. The decision speaks well of an effort to concentrate resources in a few universities while continuing to support a diversity of institutions. The Ministry took the poor showing of Malaysia’s tertiary institutions in the world ranking tables seriously andsought to put the four on track by providing additional funds. To build up a strong research base in UM,rationalize the promotion, management, coordination and monitoring of activities of eight recently-established research clusters, 20 faculties and 35 research centers, 137 international collaborations as well as the upsurge of postgraduate student research, the Institute of Research Management and Monitoring was set up. Underlying all research grant activities are the objectives of supporting R&D projects that can develop new products or processes in specific research clusters; and generating science-based knowledge through research. The Institute also helps research clusters by seeking out commercial applications for the products, services and technology the research produces.
These steps indicate that UM has taken up with seriousness the national challenge of trying to improve upon its tarnished reputation among world university rankings. Attracting additional funds,internationalizing faculty recruitment and student enrollments, and restructuring the organization and management of research are indeed necessary. However, to be consistent with changes in policy and structure,it would be wise to review some fundamental aspects of university support. The current status of database management, for example, is relatively weak and has to be seriously enhanced as a basic requirement in improved research infrastructure and overall policy and decision making. To illustrate: university records are available electronically only after 2002. Prior to that, data will have to be accessed and processed manually,with no guarantee that record-keeping is sufficiently efficient in this respect. Decades of bureaucratic procedures and lack of transparency dog many of Malaysia’s institutions, including UM, and anecdotal evidence reveals that researchers face many obstacles in retrieving institutional and organizational data. The new focus on research clusters, centers and institutes, coupled with more accountable monitoring, evaluation and reporting procedures developing under the ‘research university’ blueprint have the potential of establishing a more robust management and research environment.
Interviews were conducted with faculty members regarding the new research environment and the general tenor of responses was varied. Some senior members were disconcerted by the performance targets and new research imperatives, but convinced that their tenured status would provide a vital safety-net. The young and ambitious were enthusiastic but apprehensive, citing weak research skills at faculty senior management level. High achievers in both groups were excited about the potential to perform and be recognized.
PERFORMANCE SIGNPOSTS AND INDICATORS OF SUCCESS
The journey towards excellence in research and teaching in universities are marked by measures indicating how far they have traveled, and how far they are from their destinations. Markers used here include external university rankings; productivity in terms of research output, international peer-reviewed publications, citations received and average citations per publication; the quality of faculty in terms of international recognition seen in invitational leadership positions and membership in professional organizations; and invitational participation in select conferences and associations as well as awards; and student-teacher ratios.
OVERALL INTERNATIONAL RANKING
Based on the THES World Ranking of Universities, while NUS has consistently been ranked among or close to the top 30 over 2004-2008, that of UM has declined steadily from 89 in 2004 to 246 in 2007, before recovering slightly to 230 in 2008 (see Table 1). In terms of key academic fields, NUS has the highest rank in technology, followed by biomedicine, while for UM, biomedicine ranks the highest, followed by social sciences. The gap between the two universities appear to be widest in the fields of science and technology.
SCI AND SSCI-INDEXED PAPERS AND CITATIONS
World university ranking exercises have made government and higher education officials aware of publication and citations of scientific papers resulting in policy changes in most universities regarding faculty research outputs. Such publications serve as quantitative indicators of productivity and serve as an important avenue of knowledge transfer. On this measure, there is a significant gap between the research output of UM and other Malaysian universities designated as research universities on the one hand, and those of the leading Asian countries on the other. Table 2 shows that the number of SCI and SSCI-indexed papers produced over January 1999 to February 2009 by UM was 3,440 publications, only about one-third of the output of the next closest university, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), which published 10,400 papers over this period. The publications output of NUS for the same period was double that of HKUST. The difference is all the greater when taking into account the size difference between the universities: HKUST has a faculty size of approximately 400, UM 1,918 (2008) and NUS 2,103 faculty and 1,710 research staff. Malaysian universities also fall somewhat behind the others, whether measured by citations per paper or citations per faculty. For the former, all three Malaysian universities received approx 4 citations per paper,whereas most of the comparison universities received more than 7 citations per paper (Table 2). The WUR gave a ranking of 376 in 2005 to UM. This was lower than most of the comparison universities listed in Table
Table 3 compares the research publication performance of NUS and UM in four major academic fields over the period of 1981-2003. As can be seen, UM has fallen behind NUS not only in terms of the quantity of international-refereed publications tracked by SCI and SSCI over the years in all four fields, but also in termsof the quality of their publications as measured by the average number citations received in the following 5 years after the date of the publications.
Note: SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals only; the citation rate is calculated in the following manner: The number of citations within 5 years of publication were collated (eg the number of citations made in1981-1986 are collated for papers published in 1981, etc). The total number of publications and citations for each of the three time periods (1981-83, 1991-93 and 2001-03) are then pooled, and based on this, the average citation rate per publication rate is calculated.
While the debate continues within UM faculty on the functioning of ISI articles and citations as a qualitative indicator, Malaysian universities have recently developed their own policies in encouraging/supporting publications by their academic staff. The new strategy of UM management improve the overall academic culture has specific requirements based on ISI publications. In order to be promoted to full professorships (there are three levels), among other requirements, the candidate must have 35 ISI (or SCOPUS) publications at least 10 of which should have 10 citations. The requirements move downwards with faculty designation. The ISI publication requirements stretch to the admission of doctoral level students: doctoral candidates should have at least 2 ISI listed publications. The same strategies are to beused by the other research universities as well. Among the concerns is the status of UM’s own 50-odd journals, some of which have been regularly published for three to four decades, and have developed a clientele of their own. How will this shift in focus affect these journals and currently available resources?
One of the by-products of the THES-QS World University Rankings is MoHE’s own ranking system for Malaysian public universities known as the Rating System for Malaysian Higher Education Institutions (or SATARA which is the acronym in Malay) following an Academic Reputation Survey conducted in theprevious year. The results of the first SATARA exercise, involving seven of the more established universities,were published in 2008 and UM topped the country. On a scale of 6 (internationally excellent) it was the only university which achieved a rating of 5. Given the current leadership and management change, and the spirit of competition among the four Research Universities in the country, it would be interesting to see how UM fares in the next round.
LEVELS OF PATENTING
Despite its flaws, patenting can be used as a proxy measure of technological invention that has potentialeconomic value. In particular, the number of patents granted by the US patent office is often used as aninternational benchmark indicator, to ensure comparability across countries, and given that the US is the largest market in the world (Trajtenberg, 2002). As Table 4 shows, while NUS has significantly increased its patenting output in the post-2000 period, there has been negligible patenting output from UM since 1990.
Cheng (2009) has argued that the low level of patenting by Malaysian universities may be partly an outcome of a government policy which clearly delineated the research roles played by universities and PRIs. The 5th Malaysia Plan, implemented from 1986 to 1990, stipulated that universities would give greater emphasis to basic research (40%) relative to PRIs (10%) (Cheng 2009). However, her assumption that a highemphasis on basic research does not generate commercializable research is not valid, because many of the leading universities in the world, including MIT and Stanford, that are highly focused on basic research have also been very prolific in generating patents. Likewise, the rapid rise in patenting among the leading Asian universities such as NUS and Tsinghua over the last ten years coincided with a growing emphasis on basic research. Rather than the basic vs. applied distinction, it is the quality of the research, and its strategic focus on economic significance (the so-called strategic basic research, or “Pasteur quadrant”), that likely matters.
INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION, RECOGNITION, AWARD AND COLLABORATIONS
The recognition given by peers to institutions and to individual scholars and researchers throughinvitations to join selected academic and professional societies, high-level academic and professionalconferences, election to world bodies, and prestigious awards are important markers of quality based on peer evaluation. There is no dearth of such recognition in the chronicles of NUS (see NUS Annual Reports,various years). For example, in 2007, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy became the first institution outside of Europe and North America to join the prestigious Public Policy Network. In the same year NUS President Shih Chin Fong was awarded the Chief Executive Leadership Award by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). NUS also became a founding member of the 10-member International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) in 2006. At the faculty level, an increasing number of joint degree programs has been established between NUS and other leading universities in the world (e.g.UCLA, Karolinska Institute and Peking University), testifying to the growing standing of NUS in the international academic community.
Records show that in the past Malaysia’s participation and performance in international academic activities has been intermittent, more dependent on individual staff pro-activity than on common universitypractice has been uneven A clear thrust forward is discernible over the last five years, which is generallylinked to the collective response to world university rankings and their aftermath.
For a number of years UM has participated in the International Exhibition of Inventors, Techniques and Products (ITEX) in G eneva, Switzerland. In 2005, UM 19 gold medal awards in a range of products and in 2009 this went up to 32 awards. In 2006, at the Seoul International Fair, the UM team won 4 gold medals.Most recently, in August 2009, Professor Cheng Har Yip, a surgeon at UM’s Medical Faculty, won an award for her outstanding research on breast cancer. She was awarded the International Union Against Cancer 2009Reach to Recovery International Health Professional Award at a conference in Brisbane, Australia, the only non-Australian recipient to receive the award from the US-based body. In 2008, the Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Unit of the same Faculty was designated one of 16 centers of excellence in the world by Organisation Mondiale d’Endoscopie Digestive (World Organization of Digestive Endoscopy), both significant recognition of international level achievements.
Importantly, at institutional level, there is continuing work to receive international accreditation for programs, key to world-wide recognition, and the Medical Faculty, among other faculties, has been proactive in these efforts. The Department of Anaesthesiology at the UM Medical Center was accredited by the Hospital Accreditation Committee, Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists for Basic and Advanced Training in Anaesthesia . Other teaching programs recognized by professional institutions include:Bachelor of Engineering by the Institute of Chemical Engineers; Bachelor of Accounting by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales; Master in Medical Physics by the Institute of Physics andEngineering Medicine; and Bachelor of Dental Surgery by the General Dental Council of UK.
LESSONS LEARNED
The comparison between NUS and UM is instructive. It shows how strategic thinking about national development and economic growth, as in the Singapore case, can become a driver for academic excellence,enabling a university from a newly industrialized economy to rapidly ascend into the league of leading global universities. This survey of NUS’ achievements highlights its attention to continuity of leadership; effective strategic planning for the future; nurturing of students and investing in pedagogy; provision of more than adequate financial and human resources; and provision of a research and academic infrastructure that spans local and international settings seamlessly. The decades that NUS has taken to progressively transform herself to move up the ladder of global excellence largely mirrors the larger transformation of the Singaporeeconomy from a third world to a first world (Lee 2000). As Singapore moves increasingly towards competing as a knowledge-based economy in the 21st century, NUS no longer just aims to meet the educational needs ofthe local population, but has set its vision to become a “global knowledge enterprise” that not only excels globally in the traditional missions of research and teaching, but also takes on the “third mission” of becoming an “entrepreneurial” university that spawns successful high tech spin-offs and generates economic wealth through technology commercialization (Etzkowitz et. al. 2000; Wong, Ho and Singh 2009).
The challenge that faces UM is one faced by any institution or organization that has to change its mission and priorities, affecting deep-rooted working principles, regulations, and financial management systems (Salmi 39-43). The history of UM demonstrates that national‐level policies can severely constrain the institutional development of a public university. This can have significant long‐term consequences in terms of limiting its capacity and culture to pursue academic excellence and to compete internationally, given that such institutional capacity & culture take a long time to build.The recently-introduced performance targets are useful tools and, rigorously utilized, can lead to a culture of iscipline in research and teaching, creating important contributions to the knowledge-based economy. A more complex process is winning the hearts and minds of the major segment of stakeholders, the academic and research staff, providing rationales, incentives and rewards in order to get new modalities to work. Theprocess of experiential learning in itself would place UM in a strong position among universities in Malaysia.
The new leadership has reviewed the overall regulatory framework and appears to have sufficient autonomy to change practices to fit new institutional priorities. The likelihood is that both university management and the government want to sustain efforts, using world rankings as a tremendous source of motivation for laggards. The transformation of a university to match a new vision and new targets is a courageous endeavor: it is also one that requires political will to stay the course over the long term.
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[1] The University and Colleges Act 1971 banned students from holding political office in organizations outside the university such as trade unions and political parties. In 1975, the Act was amended to further limit student involvement in politics. They were prohibited from becoming members of, or expressing any form of support for, political parties or trade unions.Section 15 of the Act prohibits a student or a student organization, body or group from associating with outside organizations, except as provided under the Constitution or approved by the Vice-Chancellor of the respective university.The Section also prohibits fundraising by a student or a student organization. It defines criminal liability of office-bearers of a student organization and rules on suspension and expulsion of students charged with criminal offences. Section 16 empowers university Vice-Chancellors to suspend or dissolve any student organization that conducts itself in a manner which a Vice-Chancellor considers detrimental or prejudicial to the interests or well-being of the respective university