The magazine's survey was computed from three sources: a survey conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University, the Times Higher Education Survey, and the size of the universities' library holdings, 'as a measure of scholarly resources'. The Shanghai Jiaotong survey, in turn, is based on these criteria: the number of highly cited researchers in the natural, applied, and social sciences, number of articles published in Nature and Science in the past five years, and the number of articles in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities Indices. The Times survey considers the following: percentage of international faculty, of international students, citations per faculty member, and the faculty/student ratio.
Looking through these criteria, one fact jumps out at you: these are mostly to do with publications and prestige of research faculty. Only the faculty/student ratio of the Times survey touches on anything remotely to do with instructional quality, while percentage of international faculty and students may tell you how 'global' (as the buzzword goes) an institution is, but little about how good its teaching is. My worry is that many college-bound students and their parents will take these ratings as a measure of how well a university will instruct and prepare its students in their chosen fields. Unfortunately, this survey will be of little help in choosing which university to attend.
To call it a survey of higher education institutions is surely a misnomer. This survey is mainly about the academic bugbear of 'publish or perish', the doctrine by which publication volume is equated with performance, while teaching and mentorship, which are the foundations of academia and sound scholarship (we hear so little of this word in its traditional sense), take the back seat. A recent article in Science reported on the reactions of the Chinese scientific community to recent scandals involving the faking of data by high-profile scientists. Scientists are undoubtedly human, and subject to the same weaknesses for power, influence, and publicity. Unfortunately, these compromise the quality of science being produced, and thus hurt the scientific community. The article described how many Chinese universities have made it compulsory for postgraduate students to publish at least one (for the MA degree) or two (for the PhD) papers in internationally indexed journals before their degrees may be awarded to them. Promotion and pay rises are also linked to publication in international journals, leading to what is euphemised as 'courtesy authorship' and 'institutional authorship' for major papers being published in leading journals.
Another victim of this unhealthy culture is what an article in the Savage Minds blog calls the 'academic gift culture':
The good academic supervises, teaches and encourages students without hesitation, and does her best even when she is asked to teach courses she is tired of or uninterested in. She organises workshops and conferences, reads and comments upon draft manuscripts by collegues, and she responds to emails even from students towards whom she has no formal obligations. She accepts to sit on committees and to take part in exhausting evaluations, and she referees manuscripts for journals and publishers. Sometimes she has to get up at four thirty to catch the seven o’clock flight to Bergen or Stockholm, in order to give a guest lecture or examine a dissertation. She often goes to research seminars, and she accepts time-consuming administrative tasks at her own department.
Much of this work is anonymous, and it is either unpaid or remunerated with a symbolic fee.
Universities (or their publicity departments) often dismiss these rankings as unimportant or irrelevant, especially when they do not come out on top of their rivals, yet behind the scenes, their incentive and reward system for faculty is based upon the very same factors used to construct them, showing that they really do care. Academics have their own three-fold way of research, teaching, and administration. Naturally, if the system awards tangible research results (in the form of papers) and administration (in terms of committee chairmanship and the like), teaching will be neglected because it is the most nebulous and hardest to assess with hard numbers. Student surveys on teaching quality are notoriously unreliable, because students will tend to rate 'easy' teachers who award marks liberally very highly, while 'tougher' teachers who may be more stringent with quality will come out poorly. Furthermore, when 'star faculty' are hired on the basis of their research reputation, they are usually given very little teaching load, if any, and so it is unwise to select a college because a famous academic is there: he or she will probably teach few classes, and those that are taught will probably be oversubscribed. The Ivy League and other private universities which charge exorbitant tuition fees have frequently come under fire for leaving most teaching work to graduate students who work part time as teaching assistants, or to part-time adjunct faculty, who frequently shuttle between several schools to augment their income. The name beside a course on a course catalogue may only come to deliver a lecture to an overflowing lecture hall, then leave tutorials and discussion sessions (where the bulk of learning is done) to TAs and adjuncts.
So should we get too excited about NUS coming up among the leading 'global universities'? Well, both yes and no. Yes, because it shows that the university at least has a reputation and this can of course benefit our local students in terms of foreign student exchanges, overseas work opportunities, and the in-flow of overseas students and researchers who can enrich the local academic community. What's not hot is if the NUS administration lets this go to their heads and plays the 'ranking game' -- coming up with policies and incentive systems that serve only to drive up the university in the ranking tables but which do little to nothing for students. We must remember that education is the foundational objective of any university: since Singapore has only three universities, and NUS is the only comprehensive one among them, we cannot afford to turn out dullards. Having research and development is well and good, but not if the educated population has not been well-educated enough to appreciate its significance, or to perform competently in their professions, or to understand the issues of the day. The open book in NUS's coat of arms makes it clear: it is an institution of higher learning.
