Singapore is right to question university rankings fixation. Research has a social value, too
As any first year Philosophy undergraduate can tell you, discussion and debate have been the beating heart of university life ever since Plato's Academy.
With this in mind, the healthy, Socratic-like scepticism academics across Asia are showing towards society's obsession with university rankings is to be welcomed.
Such rankings may have a purpose, but they are far from ideal, and academics globally are being increasingly bold in questioning this purpose.
Professors Linda Lim and Pang Eng Fong highlighted in the South China Morning Post recently that placing undue emphasis on research that will capture headlines in academic journals often helps universities climb international league tables, but this comes at the expense of local research that could be more beneficial to society.
Last week, Singapore newspaper Today caused a stir with an article that highlighted the pitfalls of the rankings driven strategy. The article was based on interviews with 10 academics who had left the Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore and was headlined "Opaque policies, fixation with KPIs, rankings: why arts and humanities academics quit NUS, NTU".
The newspaper later removed the article from its website, with Mediacorp, the paper's parent company, quoted as saying the piece was the subject of a legal challenge.
Inside view of The Hive for learning at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. File photo
Whatever the merits of that particular decision, one thing seems clear: the conversation on university rankings " and their emphasis on work published in academic journals " is here to stay.
That's a good thing, because it has highlighted a deeper question regarding the role of social sciences in society: what sort of social impact should they be having?
It is a salient question for a region grappling with complex challenges such as climate change, unemployment caused by the growth of artificial intelligence, large scale human displacement, conflicts, poverty and deep-seated inequalities.
Each of these problems may be global in nature, but their uniquely Asian characteristics are shaped by transformations occurring across Asia at an ever-accelerating pace.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
One of the best ways to make a social impact with research is by engaging the community. In this area, there are countless examples of academics who are making a crucial difference to society, even if their efforts aren't the kind of work that is registered in league tables.
Dr. Nicholas Harrigan, currently at Macquarie University, and previously at Singapore Management University (SMU), has done some excellent community-based work with low wage migrant workers that offers great insights into the conditions they face. The work of Harrigan and his researchers has been key to highlighting the problems such workers face " problems that include the under-reporting of injuries by their employers and difficulties in enforcing legal rulings when their employers withhold pay.
Or consider Dr. J. J. Woo, who recently left Nanyang Technological University to join the Education University of Hong Kong. At NTU, Woo started an initiative in which his students would volunteer for six weeks at grass roots and voluntary organisations and then reflect on their experiences as part of his course Politics of Singapore.
Students at the National University of Singapore. File photo
At the National University of Singapore, the work of various colleagues of mine in the Department of Communications and New Media has made a great impact on communities. Dr. Denisa Kera, who is now a Marie Curie Fellow at Grupo de investigacion BISITE, worked with open science movements across Southeast Asia on ways to democratise the production of scientific knowledge through community ownership of science. Another colleague, Dr. Andrew Quitmeyer " the host of the Science Channel's Survival Series Hacking the Wild " built community-based digital platforms to enable collaboration between biologists, artists, designers and technologists working on field expeditions.
Both are examples of untenured academics engaging communities meaningfully while pushing academic boundaries at the same time.
In our own work at the Centre for Culture-centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (Care), we have been collaborating with local communities across Asia to build health resource centres, irrigation systems, sources of clean drinking water, roads, and health care services.
In one of our projects, a campaign titled "No Singaporeans Left Behind", we work with low income families in rental blocks in an effort to open up the conversation on poverty in Singapore.
A man scavenges for items in a dumpster in Singapore. Photo: Julio Etchart
In another project, based on a collaboration with the National University Hospital Women's Heart Health Clinic, we worked with women suffering cardiovascular disease to create a health intervention programme that encouraged healthy eating, exercise and follow-up visits.
In these projects, and others, Care's policy advocacy work has gathered community driven data to shape policies based on the experiences of marginalised communities.
HARD TO MEASURE
Projects such as these are time-intensive, often taking years to develop into fruition, and this is especially true for community-driven partnerships.
But the time spent on them does not correspond with column inches in top tier academic journals " the key metric in university ranking tables.
Therein lies one of the key challenges. How do you measure the social impact of scholarship? How do you count the boost a community receives from a social project?
The very nature of such community based work makes it hard to measure. The complexity of the local context does not translate into the sort of generalisable theoretical concepts academic journals are looking for.
The labour involved in community-based social science is therefore disproportionate to the scholarly outputs generated by the work.
The message often being sent to junior academics is therefore, "Stay away from engaged work". The implicit understanding is that it is professional suicide to conduct socially impactful scholarship, especially community-engaged scholarship. This in turn translates into a paradox in which social science scholarship becomes disconnected from society.
Partnerships with community voices might also run into limits on academic freedom, especially in Asian universities where scholarly outputs are constrained by institutional, societal, and state-driven diktats.
These challenges are made worse because there are so few community-engaged scholar-teachers at the rank of professor in Asia. This lack of representation in the senior ranks means university evaluation committees lack understanding of socially impactful scholarship.
Singapore Education Minister Ong Ye Kung. File photo
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Singapore is taking the lead in this debate. In a speech delivered to the Times Higher Education summit in Singapore, the Lion City's Minister of Education Ong Ye Kung urged university leaders and ranking agencies to develop new metrics that took into account the societal benefits of universities.
One way to do this might be to follow the lead of the US-based Campus Compact, a coalition of more than 1,000 US colleges and universities (including highly ranked universities such as Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Yale) that is dedicated to promoting campus-based civic engagement. In doing so, it encourages universities to incorporate social impact as a metric in promotion and tenure processes.
The scholarship of engagement is an excellent anchor for grappling with the role of community impact in social science research.
As Asian universities grow their global presence and simultaneously grapple with their local relevance, conversations about what constitutes social impact in the social sciences are a vital starting point. Thankfully, we've got the discussion started.
Mohan J. Dutta is the Dean's Chair Professor and Director of the Centre for Culture-centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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