Vice-Chancellor's position mostly "administrative"? Think again

It saddens me greatly to read that our Minister of Higher Education, Dr. Shafie Salleh, has once again shown his ignorance of what higher education is about when he proclaimed that a VC need not be an academic because it is primarily an "administrative job". Such a remark shows that he's totally clueless about what is wrong with the state of higher education because a VC's job is much more than just an "administrative" job. As a leader of a research university, one of the VC's most important tasks is to promote the growth of academic excellence in his or her university. Only a person who has had extensive experience within the academic setting would know how to effectively accomplish this objective.

Perhaps Dr. Shafie Salleh should have examined the profile of the presidents or vice-chancellors of some of the better known universities in the world to see if they had an academic background or not for this "administrative" position. Let me list a few of them from the US:

Lawrence Summers - President of Harvard, PhD. in Economics, MIT
Richard Brodhead - President of Duke, PhD. in English, Yale
Shirley Tilghman- President of Princeton, PhD. in Molecular Biology, Temple
Robert Dynes -President of the University of California system, PhD. in Physics, McMaster University

All the aforementioned presidents not only have PhDs but are also or have been former (and some current) professors in their respective fields before taking up their current positions. They know the academic practice in terms of teaching and research because they have been through it and excelled in it as well.

No doubt there are some exceptions to the rule, like the recently appointed President of the University of North Carolina system, Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff to President Clinton, but these exceptions are exactly that, exceptions rather than the norm.

Let's look to the UK then.

Alison Richards - Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, PhD. in Primate Biology, University of London
John Hood - Vice-Chancllor of Oxford, PhD. in Engineering, University of Auckland
Richard Sykes - Rector of Imperical College, PhD. in Biochemistry, Bristol University

Again, there are exceptions including Howard Davies, the director of one of my alma maters, LSE, who was the chairman of the Financial Services Authority in the UK before becoming director of the LSE.

But even the exceptions to the rule have been appointed because of their impressive CVs and vast experience in other fields which are definitely not "administrative", as our Minister puts it. They were appointed to lead their respective universities, not just "administer" them.

How about universities in our region?

Gavin Brown - Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University, PhD. in Mathematics, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Shih Choon Fong - President of National University of Singapore, PhD. in Engineering, Harvard
Mark Wainwright - Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, PhD. in Chemical Engineering, McMaster University

I didn't have the time to do this but I bet if you compile a database of the the past 10 presidents / vice-chancellors / rectors / directors of the top 100 universities in the world (using either the THES rankings or the Shanghai Jiaotong rankings), you would find that over 95% of them would have PhDs and would have had academic experience of one sort or another. I wonder if this fact has ever crossed the mind of our Minister of Higher Education?

His accusation of academic 'in-breeding' only applies if this person has been stuck in our local varsity system all his or her life. If one examines the profile of the VCs and Presidents of the top notch universities, one can easily find that most of them would have graduated from a good university, taught in another, and then become VCs or Presidents of their current university. Almost all of them would have impressive CVs and experience of an academic as well as non-academic nature. This surely can't be a sign of the 'in-breeding' that Shafie alleges. Or is he only pointing the finger at the current crop of VCs in Malaysia, specifically the VC of UM?

I have a suspicion that Shafie might have taken a look around and concluded that there might be a possibility that no well-qualified candidate can be found within the local university system for the VC job and that he might have to find someone from the private sector or from the government. Who knows, he might even want to appoint a politician to the post!

I sincerely hope that Shafie doesn't think that the VC's job is a purely "administrative" one in the narrowest sense of the word. A VC's job is multifacted and challenging from many aspects. He has got to push for excellence in academic and research standards, he has got to figure out ways to obtain sufficient funding to achieve these objectives, he has to oversee a recruiting process that will bring in the best and brightest brains to teach in his university and so on (I use 'he' in a generic sense lest I be accused of being sexist).But the fact that he thinks the VC position is merely an "administrative" one leaves me to wonder if he really knows what higher education is about. I've been trying to google him to find our where he got his PhD / medical degree from. Surely he must have gained some insight into higher education from where he got his graduate degree? Can someone help me find this out? Or his "Dr." an honorary title?