Stuck in those ivory towers

Academics are unique in their various types of expertise, but they should be sharing that in ways that benefit society, not competing over rankings.

THROUGHOUT my academic career, I could never relate to or find meaning in statements by academic leadership like “We must be No.1”, or “We must be the best university” or “We must get into the top 100”, or the top 2%, etc.

All these measures of supposed excellence have absolutely no meaning whatsoever for me. The idea of “competing” to be the best or in the top 100 or the top 2% is simply about bench-marking. In the corporate world, this is the way success is measured. And academia adopted this method without blinking an eye or asking any questions.

When a university claims that it is among the top 100 in world rankings, I usually ask, top in doing what and to whom? Apparently this question is never asked in the matrix used to measure this competition. The matrix lists research grant values, number of students, number of memoranda of agreements, number of papers published, number of citations received, etc.

Did the university improve or change any racial or religious conflicts or any other pressing public issue in the country it is located in? Nope, no clue. Did the university or its academic personalities become household names in referencing issues? No, academia must not be measured like influencers or TV actors or movie actresses.

When names are discussed to fill an academic post, again it is about numbers, usually boiling down to what is his or her h-index. What is that? You should ask ChatGPT for an explanation because I never really bothered to learn what it is.

No one asks how an academic contributed to society or how original his or her research is. For me, knowledge is about solving some kind of human issue. Identify the major problems. Then figure out how your discipline can address those issues.

At various levels of promotion, the question then should be about what is his or her level of contribution to the generation of the specific knowledge and what is the difficulty factor within that activity?

At the highest promotion level we should be asking what new boundary of knowledge is crossed and what legacy of knowledge generation has been produced, what questions generated, and how effective the public and academic discourse created? These are the questions I would ask. Not what their h-index is, whatever that is.

I have avoided being dictated to by these numbers through my whole career. For me, first, being a product of the Islamic Reform movement begun by such figures as our present prime minister, my big picture question was how can the Muslim community be made versatile with knowledge, values of social justice and Islamic brotherhood?

My specific discipline calls for an architecture of the mosque that would question its design concept by reinventing the role and purpose of the building and institution as a community centre.

Four decades on, as I watch the rhetoric of hatred and intolerance increase, and as cheap posturing by politicians as well as netizens and influencers dominate the narrative, I have enlarged the question to encompass the issue of Muslim co-existence in a globalised world that would place the mosque now as an agent of nation-building and global bridging between communities.

To do this, I have been taking the discourse into the public realm with more than 100 pieces of writing in the media and dozens of YouTube videos a year, plus talks, forums and online discussions.

I rarely write academic papers for journals, though I train my PhD students to do so. Such writing is much easier than coming up with media articles to mitigate an inflammatory issue – this requires the highest form of diplomatic and strategic writing, definitely not for graduate students, only for the Tok Guru or professor. But professors who can – or want to – communicate with the public seem rather rare.

Over the years I have come to see that I have no competition in my field of expertise. Who would want to argue that the mosque can be a community centre for all communities, that it can contribute towards nation-building? Who would want to speak and write about Islamic social justice for all? Who would want to criticise Friday sermons that feed into extremist narratives? No one.

And if anyone was ever willing to step into this arena, I wouldn’t count it as competition, I would see him or her as a friend.

From my perspective, academia is limited by all these measurements and competition. While the world burns with misunderstanding and hate-mongering and illegal military operations, universities isolate themselves in their own little box.

Who in that box would dare set “agent for social change” as a KPI? It’s easier just to meet the measurement criteria set by the university and endorsed by the Higher Education Ministry. Just fill in the numbers and you’ll get promoted.

I believe each academic is unique in his or her own expertise and should complement the development of society. And I believe university leadership should take the time to ask the right questions when it comes to evaluating an academic – and then perhaps we can move out of that little box and engage with society properly.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.