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.”
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