University of Texas at Dallas

UT Dallas is not a household name in Malaysia. Indeed, it's not even a household name in the United States. Most people would associate UT (University of Texas) with its flagship campus in Austin, Texas. (One of my favorite cities in the US, I may add) I recently met an Indian student from UT Dallas who enlightened me about how important a research university UT Dallas actually is. I think UT Dallas holds interesting lessons for our own public universities in Malaysia.

According to Wikipedia, UT Dallas is actually the largest research university within the UT system, even larger than UT at Austin. But it's not that surprising given that UT Dallas started out as a research arm of Texas Instruments (TI), probably one of the most innovative large corporations in the US. UT Dallas started giving out graduate degrees before conferring undergrad degrees which might explain why the academic standards there are relatively high, especially for a state school that is not named Michigan or Berkeley.

There are strong collaborative roots between TI and UTD. This is best exemplified by the 3 billion dollar fab plant built by TI in 2004 on the campus grounds of UTD accompanied by a $85-million Natural Science and Engineering Research Building that was also built on the UTD campus by UTD. It seems that UTD has a number of serious looking research centers. And I'm guessing that these centers are not just website 'for show', unlike some of the research centers associated with certain public universities in Malaysia which also have websites associated with them but with far less research activity (not all of course, but a fair number).

I'm sure that there is good research being done in parts of our public university system which many of us are not aware of. But this kind of research environment takes years to create and requires a lot of funding, especially when it comes to the sciences and engineering. And it's not just about throwing money at a certain venture, which the Malaysian government and some VCs may be keen to 'promote'. It's got a lot to do with putting in the right people and also inculcating the right mentality and research culture.

For example, I was told by a friend that it is very risky to share your uncompleted research with colleagues in our public universities because it is very likely that your ideas or work in progress may be 'stolen' by others. Not the kind of culture that promotes research, to say the least.

The UTD example shows that you need a combination of factors to create an up and coming research university - a combination of private and public funding, a combination of public and private know-how, high intellectual standards, a long gestation in creating a culture of research, progressive leadership at the management level, just to name a few.

I think that among all of our public universities, USM actually has the best shot of making a jump into the league of respectable universities in Asia. They have a very progressive VC who has reached out to create some of the things discussed in this blog and in this post - a good research culture, encouraging public-private cooperation, high intellectual standards that is exemplified partly by transparent promotion exercises (by Malaysian standards anyways) and so on. It was no mistake that it was USM rather than UKM or UM that was awarded with the status of the 'Apex' university. I would encourage our VCs to try to get some of these basics right first rather than to aim for the more 'shallow' goal of getting back among the top 200 universities in the THES rankings or to produce the first Nobel prize winner by 2050. Just look at UTD. Nobody outside the US has heard of it. But the people who are involved in certain research areas most certainly are aware of this up and coming research university.