faulker059

As my co-bloggers often take pains to point out, rankings are far from everything. But still, rankings are something , so here are the top 200 universities in the world, as ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement . UM has reentered the top 200, a welcome development. The Vice-Chancellor is targeting further improvement .

Lest I be accused of always bashing UM, here's a bit of good news concerning the oldest university in our young country. "Singapore’s youngest private university, SIM University (UniSIM), is cooperating with Universiti Malaya (UM) to expand the use of Bahasa Malaysia at the international level through sharing of expertise, syllabus and training. UniSIM president Prof Cheong Hee Kiat said the two institutions hoped to realise the objective through such cooperation forged for UniSIM’s Bachelor in Malay Language and Literature programme." Good to see UM's comparative advantage put to good use abroad. Perhaps this can be replicated in other places e.g. Thailand or China?

One of the first initiatives announced by new UM VC, Prof Ghauth Jasmon, is the decision to increase the number of post graduate students at the UM and reducing the number of undergrads. This is not really something new. We've blogged about it here and here . Many of my previously expressed concerns are still valid today. What I fear more is that this may be a smokescreen that the new VC will be forced to use to increase the number of foreigners at the postgrad level in an attempt to artificially boost UM's position in the THES rankings. This is a sample of what I previously blogged about: The first question that comes to mind is this - where are all these 'extra' postgraduate students going to come from? According to the same Table, to achieve this three fold increase in postgraduate student enrolment, we need to have an annual average growth rate of 26% for the next 5 years. That seems like a pretty tall task. Imagine a faculty with 40 Phd students and 40 Masters stu...

Below is an edited version of an email I sent to an academic in UM whom I've been corresponding with. I received news from this academic that the new UM VC was being pushed to bring UM back into the top 200 in the THES rankings within 2 years and back into the top 100 within 5 years. One of the things he's been trying to do is to 'force' UM academics to publish a minimum of 2 articles in journals which are considered 'impactful' journals (or ISI journals). My advice to the UM VC: Concentrate on cleaning up the promotion process instead of being distracted by this pipe dream of climbing the THES rankings. Apologies for the late reply. Was overdosing on turkey yesterday. This is what I wrote to the new VC in a previous post : P.S. One of the first pieces of 'advice' I would give to Dr. Jasmon is to read the measurements in the THES rankings very carefully. That way, he can avoid making some of the same mistakes made by his predecessors. For example, Rafiah...

I was quite surprised to read Malaysiakini's exclusive two part interview with Rafiah Salim and how frank she was when she was interviewed. You can read the reports here and here . She certainly pulled no punches including a classic 'thing between the legs' line that may have been the highlight of the interview. I'll share some of my thoughts in regard to her tenure and the manner in which she was let go. When she was first appointed as UM's VC in August 2006, both Tony and I said positive things about her initially. She hit the right notes and said some progressive things in regard to raising the quality of academic at UM. Then came the ' silencing ' of Azmi Sharom, who was initially asked to stop writing his Star column. That decision was later changed to not writing anything about UM in that column. I also didn't like how she was trying to play up the appointment of Jeff Sachs as the Ungku Aziz chair of poverty studies because I knew that he would...

Short post from SK Thew, a former MMU student, on the new UM VC. Sounds positive.

Hot off the press - Dr. Ghauth Jasmon has been picked as the latest VC of UM. According to the bio page of Unity College International, where he is the current CEO, "Prof Ghauth Jasmon graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1979 and the PhD degree in Power Systems Engineering in 1982 from the University of London." Before his current appointment at UCI, he was the president of MMU. My first thoughts on this appointment is to wonder if the Minister of Higher Education, Khaled Nordin, actually went through a VC selection committee, something which Tok Pa, the former Minister had promised, was to be a permanent committee. Tony has blogged extensively on this issue before including here and here . If this committee was tasked with the job of searching for a replacement for Rafiah Salim, it must have done its work very quietly since we never heard about its work anywhere. My suspicion is that they were probably not consulted at all, if such a c...

I want to reproduce a letter written by a friend of mine - Andrew Aeria - on the move by UM to scrap a talk that was supposed to have been given by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi. Just to clarify, the letter is written with a sarcastic tone, in case there is any confusion. Congrats to the UM VC! Andrew Aeria | Oct 23, 08 4:38pm I refer to the Malaysiakini report Invite to Nobel laureate scrapped after 'protest from students'. I am writing to congratulate Rafiah Salim, the vice-chancellor of Universiti Malaya for bravely and single-handedly putting Malaysian academia back into the international spotlight. Well done, Rafiah. By caving in to some obviously hidebound ‘Iranian students’ and cancelling Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi’s scheduled lecture on 'Islam and Cultural Diversity' at UM, you gratuitously displayed to the world your university administration’s equally immaculate bigoted view of academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge. Certainly, as Mal...