Give me those grants!

I read this terrific letter in the Star by Zaharom Nain, an associate professor at the Centre for International Studies in Universiti Sains Malaysia, on research grant abuses in the local university system. I'd encourage our readers to read it too.

I don't want to analyze every statement made by Dr. Zaharom though many of his points are spot on. I want to discuss his letter in the context of one of my favorite topics - incentives. It is clear from her letter that many of his grant hungry colleagues respond to incentives. It is a path towards promotion. It is a way to obtain 'easy money'.

The only problem is that the incentives, in this context, are screwed up. Here in the US, almost all professors across all fields have to apply for grant money. While there are tons of grants out there from different institutions, both private and public, the grant application process is also extremely competitive. Most importantly, the grants are used towards an end product - a publication(s) in a journal, as a report or as a book. Grants are a means towards an end. In Malaysia, we seemed to have stopped just at the means.

Dr. Zaharom says that "there have been – and continue to be – many local academics who hold numerous research grants but have come up with virtually nothing of value, save the oft-repeated “unpublished research report”. And what is frightening is that this genre of “unpublished research report” is fast becoming the norm and no longer the exception in Malaysia."

The point of this posting is this: If academics respond to incentives such as the need to have grants to obtain promotions, then is it not reasonable to assume that they would respond to incentives such as promotions based on their publication records?

The only hitch is that applying for grants might be the easy part. Getting published (especially in internationally renowned journals) is the hard part. My gut feel is that often times, things operate in a virtuous (on in this case, unvirtuous) cycle. In the haste to promote academics up the ladder, many underqualified ones have been promoted. Their publication records are far from stellar. If this is the case, then is it realistic for these, by now, senior academics to exact a more stringent promotion process and requirement on their more junior staff?

There's a saying in economics - "Bad money drives out good money". If the circulation of fake money in an economy reaches a certain point, everyone would keep their genuine money at home and only transact using fake money. Past this point, all bills in circulation would be fake money. Put in the local university context, if academics are rewarded based on something other than their publication record, then past a point, you'd have almost all academics with poor publication records. The good ones would have left the country, retired, gone into another profession or committed suicide (I'm kidding on the last one).

Thankfully, we haven't reached that stage yet. I know of many good academics in our local university system. One of these days, when I have more free time, I'll start compiling the publishing record of our scholars in fields which I am more familiar with - political science and economics. I'll go through each department in our major research universities (UM, UKM, USM, to start) and do a google.com and scholar.google.com search and list their publication 'hits'. It's a rough and ready indicator but I'm sure it'll tell a more or less accurate story. I did a google search for Dr. Zaharom and found more than a dozen publication hits, many of them in international journals. I did a similiar search for four professors in the School of Business Management under the Faculty of Economics and Business in UKM and found that only one of them had any significant hits on scholar.google.com. Try the exercise yourself - I'm sure you'll find it amusing. (Being a 2nd year grad student, I don't have any major publications yet so a scholar.google search on me won't yield any significant hits. Hopefully this will change next year when a book that I'm co-authoring with another US academic, Dr. Bridget Welsh, on Malaysian elections come out.