FIRST I wish to congratulate Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed for his recent New Year’s address where he reiterated the need for universities to work harder and to obtain better world rankings. In my opinion, ranking boils down to content versus profile.

It has intrigued me to find the correct balance between the need for profile and the requirements to build the content needed to project the good profile.

If you spend a lot of money on advertising and printing your propaganda material on glossy paper without having the content you will only end up losing credibility.

If you spend your entire budget on enhancing your content without making much effort in creating the right profile you end up being good, but lacking visibility.

As an academician, I often hear my colleagues debating this issue. Some are adamant that we don’t need to do any profiling or branding at all, as universities the likes of Harvard and Oxbridge don’t need to advertise to be well known.

But then again, these universities have hundreds of years of tradition. We, the young universities less than 50 years old, will have to face the reality of this new age called the communications age.

We are living in a small global village. Information gets transmitted very quickly.

Previously, what took place in the universities remained a mystery to the public at large.

We were the dwellers of the ivory towers looking out and happy to go about our business of teaching and learning, and researching and publishing. There was no one to gauge how well we did our jobs.

And then came about this new phenomenon called world rankings.

The ivory tower has been replaced by a glasshouse.

Our actions are visible to the public and our performance is being measured.

The public can see us now, but they may still not fully comprehend what is actually taking place.

To begin with quality would be the underlying factor in anything we do.

Upon reflection, quality in teaching and learning corresponds directly with the quality of your research.

You can’t profile and teach well if you lack content, and we know that content comes from the research that you do.

I also figured that for every 10 journal papers that we write we should also spare time to share with the public what we are doing by writing to newspapers, magazines and appearing on shows to talk about our research.

We are visible now and we need to communicate with the public and the taxpayers, whose money we are spending. We have to be accountable.

During pre-globalisation, we just had to “walk our talk” but in this day and age we are required to “talk our quality walk.”

Rankings are here to stay. We have to compete to stay relevant or we will perish.

PROF DR YANG

FARINA ABDUL AZIZ,

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Source: The Star – January 29, 2008