Thursday October 26, 2006

Silly season in Bolehland

COMMENT BY ZAHAROM NAIN

AROUND this time, every year for the past few years, two events take place, marking the arrival of “silly season” in Malaysia Bolehland.

The first, of course, is THE HAZE. More accurately, it should be called THE SMOG, but over time we’ve been trained, like obedient mongrels, to accept the more neutral, non-contentious term “haze”. After all, “haze” gives an ambiguous, almost romantic, feel to this lethal environmental hazard.

But make no mistake – smog kills.

Sadly, despite this fact, there seems to be very little political will in the region to prevent this yearly disaster. After all, we know where it’s coming from. We know why it happens. We know it’s hazardous and, indeed, kills. We know it hits various industries, including our much-touted tourism industry.

Yet, we let it happen year in, year out.

And when it repeats itself next year, I’m sure our political masters will, yet again, come up with potential solutions.

On our behalf, they will urge the setting-up of a regional anti-haze fund to put out the fires that often are started by people in the first place.

In our name, they will politely ask Indonesia to ratify and comply with the 2002 Asean Regional Haze Action Plan.

And when the smog clears in a couple of months or due to a fortunate change in wind direction, all will be forgotten – even forgiven – until it happens again the following year.

Daft. But that’s what the silly season is all about.

Which brings us to the second event signifying the season: the release of the annual Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) world university rankings.

Having suffered the acute embarrassment of falling rather far down the rankings last year, our local public universities were a wee bit more relieved this year, crawling up the ladder and not slithering down. With the exception of poor Universiti Malaya (UM), that is.

Not only did our (former) premier university find itself slipping out of the Top 200 international universities, but, to add insult to injury, it found itself being leap-frogged by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), which made the Top 200 for the first time.

In spite of debates questioning the methodology used by THES and the argument that, despite being lower than UKM, UM is still better in a number of categories, I suspect that local public universities, nonetheless, do take these rankings to heart.

If nothing else, perhaps it will make us stop making wild assertions about some local university or another being (or becoming) the “Harvard of the East”.

Why is it that we love making these embarrassing pronouncements when we know that we are nowhere near achieving what Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge have taken so long and hard to achieve?

Surely the proper thing to do would be to take cognisance of the circumstances behind the rankings and move on from there, attempting to strengthen the areas we are weak in?

And, to be honest, will we really be strengthening these areas by going on international road shows “selling” our universities and attending (intellectually) obscure exhibitions, winning medals that might boost our egos and do little else?

Or should we really be addressing important questions like why we aren’t getting very far in the Citation Indices, why more than a few local academics’ publications are not good enough to be cited in recognised international journals?

Even before that, perhaps we need to ask why is it that some local academics these days cannot even get published internationally? Granted, many of these publications are in English and standards of English have certainly dropped, even in Malaysian universities. But if a research paper in, say, Malay, were of international standard, surely a good English translator would be able to prime it for publication in an international journal or book?

This aside, I believe one of the lessons we can learn – though we appear reluctant to do so – from all these ranking exercises is that the top universities have built a long history of excellence, stressing meritocracy and academic freedom. For them, standards cannot be compromised.

Can we honestly say the same for our universities? If we can, then how do we explain official figures about rising graduate unemployment and surveys indicating that some of these graduates are not only unemployed but also unemployable?

Of course, we could, on the other hand, rationalise these rankings, as one prominent letter in a Malay daily tried to do recently. The tone of the letter was that we should jaga maruah kita (maintain our dignity) in light of the current standing of our universities.

Basically, the letter writer argued that we should forget the world rankings and, instead, just concentrate on the Asian rankings.

If we then eliminate the 14 Australian and New Zealand universities from this list (since they are not “Asian”, after all), said this brilliant writer, UKM and UM would be high up in the Asian Top 50.

And, if we were to re-categorise this listing to just include Asean countries, “Einstein” concluded, our universities would only be below Singapore and Thailand! Hence, our maruah would be maintained.

Maruah? One wonders what dignity there could be in exalting mediocrity.

n Zaharom Nain teaches at Universiti Sains Malaysia, the undisputed No 1 university in the whole of Penang and in the northern region of Peninsular Malaysia.

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