UM needs a strategic vision and well-defined goals to achieve that vision

One of the many problems inflicting public officials in our country is that they are often reactive, not proactive. UM’s VC is an especially good recent example of this. He reacted when the 2004 THES rankings came out last year by ordering multitudes of posters hailing the fact that UM was one of the top 100 universities in the world. He reacted again recently when this year’s THES rankings came out showing that UM’s ranking had slipped to 169 by saying that he was not too worried.

The sad fact is that many among the Malaysian public have lost confidence in the quality of our public universities. What is sadder still is the fact that we don’t see how UM will pull itself out of its continual decline into the ranks of mediocrity that is exemplified by the likes of the VC.

As the leader of the leading public university in Malaysia, the VC has to set the strategic vision for the university backed up by well-defined goals and targets that will guide the university towards that vision. Indeed, this is what UM’s website had to say about the mission of the VC:

“To provide strategic leadership and facilitate learning in the pursuit of knowledge and human development through well-designed and quality programmes, research activities and consultancy services”

My questions are these: Does the VC have a strategic vision for the university and does he know how to get there?

Most world class universities have a corporate planning department that helps the VC chart a course for the university in the near term by coming up with 5 year plans. I have my doubts that the VC even has a 5 year plan since taking up his position in April, 2003. If he has, he should certainly make available a copy for the public through his UM website, which is rather sad looking and sparsely populated.

Running a university is already a very complicated task. The job is made even harder when someone like the VC does not have a clear idea of how he’s going to take the university to the next level of excellence. Beyond mere platitudes, I cannot recall when and if the VC has identified clear goals for UM to reach as part of his larger strategic vision.

Given that UM is nowhere near Harvard or Cambridge or even NUS or the University of Tokyo in terms of funding, teaching resources and the like, these goals do not need to be very ambitious. Indeed, while I believe that the UM needs a drastic overhaul if it is to have any chance of competing against the best Asian universities (forget about touching the best universities in the US and UK), I think there is some low-hanging fruit which can be plucked. If even these relatively easy goals are not defined and then achieved, it is unlikely that the larger ones will have any chance of success.

Let me just list a few:

a) Set targets for each department to ensure that a minimum % of its lecturers are qualified up to the PhD level and raise these targets over time. It shocks me that a university that ranks in the Top 200 universities in the world still has many departments were more than 50% of its lecturing staff don’t even have a PhD. This has something to do with the fact that UM sponsors many of its lecturers to do their PhDs overseas and then return to teach at the UM after completion but this churning cannot go on forever. I have heard of situations where lecturers are only sent off to do their PhDs in their mid to late 30s after lecturing at the university for 5 to 10 years. In any of the major state universities in the US, it would be inconceivable that someone could be a full-time lecturer without having received a PhD.
b) Set targets for each department to achieve a desired ratio of professors to associate professors to junior faculty (senior lecturers / assistant professors and below). Many lecturers are promoted to the associate professor level and stay there until retirement. While some of this could be due to non-academic factors (such as race and having the wrong ‘politics’), much of it can be attributed to the fact that there is no pressure to produce enough good work to be promoted to full professor.
c) Base promotions on objective academic measures such as publication of books and articles in journals giving higher weightage to publications that are of a higher repute and books which receive critical acclaim. Do not base promotions purely on ‘administrative duties or contributions’ which is often a buzzword for sucking up and politicking.

I am assuming that this can be done without resorting to underhanded tactics such as decreasing the requirements to obtain a promotion to associate or full professorship.
A university’s greatest assets are its faculty members. If faculty is not given incentives to perform and disincentives if they do not perform, it is hard to see how these assets can be developed and grown over time. And I haven’t even talked about efforts to recruit renowned professors from the region and beyond. Let’s start with the low hanging fruit first. If even these cannot be plucked, then we can only watch while UM slips further and further down the ranks of the mediocre. The sad reality is that nothing in the behavior of the current VC shows that firstly, he’s capable of identifying such low-hanging fruit and secondly, that he’s capable of plucking them even if they have been identified.