The scenario is the same as in so many other countries. High university officials set their goals boldly: they want a young university (it was founded in 2003) to become a world-class research university in a few years time. The goal is to get the university on the Shangai list of 500 best universities. In five years.
It sounded so surrealistic that I just couldn’t take them seriously. If you just consider the assessment criteria used by the University of Shangai, it is patently obvious that this is not a realistic goal. But it’s obvious to me and not to them. So, let’s start by taking a closer look at the rating methodology of the Shangai list.
Quality of education is determined by the number of Nobel Prize winners and field medals. You can accuse me of being blind but I really don’t see anybody coming close to getting a nomination.
The quality of faculty is determined again by the number of Nobel prize winners and by the number of researchers that are the most highly cited within 21 subject categories of Thomson ISI. As I said, we can forget the Nobel Prizes winners (unless the university imports one). As regards becoming one of the most cited researcher in a field, well, if it takes more than a year to publish excellent papers in academic journals with a high impact factor, becoming highly cited in the field takes much much longer. I doubt it can be done in 5 years.
As regards research output, the story is the same. It takes funds, which the university does not have, time, good researchers and a lot of effort before research output meets the high standards of the Shangai University list. My colleagues expect our university’s research output will be excellent in five years from now although the university is less than 10 years of age and has been focusing all these years on troublesome and competitive relationships between university colleges, on infrastructure and education. Not that these things have been sorted out! Oh yes, I’ve forgot to say, the university has been chronically financially undersourced. Consequently, per capita academic performance of the university obviously reflects these meager conditions.
However, this is not where the story ends. The university officials have decided they would achieve higher productivity of faculty by putting a price tag on time spent out of class. So they are putting together a long list of various chores teachers can/should do (each with a different tag on it expressed in “physical hours”, e.g. if you publish a research article in a journal with a high impact factor, you get a huge number of hours done, if you do a page of translation, you get 3 hours, etc.). How this new system is going to be implemented, nobody knows yet. However, they want our blessings for the list!
While exploring Alec Couros’ Computers in the classroom website, I came across this TED talk: Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom. He put it so nicely.
Filed under: Education
