Becoming an Apex University

In September USM learned that it would be Malaysia's first Apex university. The transition begins on 1/1/09. The university will receive an influx of money to help it achieve the goal of being in the top 100 world universities within 5 years. (From my limited perspective it doesn't feel achievable.)

The entire campus is engaged in planning for the transition. This weekend the School of Social Science faculty and staff were put up at The Gurney, a nicely located hotel in Georgetown. Best of all it has comfortable sheets - the sheets at the Guest House often feel knobby. Last night the weekend started with a long talk (about 1.5 hours) explaining the implications of the Apex University. The speaker was soft spoken and had wordy slides, so it was hard to pay attention. Several bits and pieces made me glad that this is not my home institution. The university expects to increase graduate enrollment - at the same time it is increasing tuition. Since increased visibility/reputation is in the future it is hard to imagine a large number of students will take advantage to spend more money to come to social sciences.In addition each unit can decide how to govern itself (I will have to wait for the Sunday morning report to get a full grasp of the implications. A huge shift for a top-down university, but no one expects much change immediately)

In the morning I sat with the Research & Innovation group. It was one of those awful exercises where one fills in a matrix. Here the boxes were "eliminate," "reduce," "raise," and "create." The rows had entries such as the number of faculty who were PIs (principal investigators) - of course they wanted more. The "grants with publications" row opened up a discussion about "grants without publications" and "publications without grants (a possibility never entertained by the matrix writers). I had looked forward to a discussion of centers of excellence, but we didn't get close. Even the need for mentoring got buried in the matrix on the number of PIs. Then there was the discussion on making sure that publications get credited to USM (for an non-academic reader these discussions are not unique to USM or Malaysia)

The afternoon session was on graduate education. Again, so much had been decided and was driven by numbers and policies it was hard to imagine that one could think out of the box. There is a fair amount of money for student support but only as RAs - which eliminates the chance for PhDs to get teaching experience. There was a brief discussion of MPA problems - a sever shortage of teachers - but I am not sure that it will get resolved. If you know of someone who has a PhD in public administration and wants to give Malaysia a shot let me know.

There were nine sessions. They will report back tomorrow morning. One of the advantages of being a visiting professor/foreign I can always duck out. At least there is good food and a comfortable bed.