Decline Of Varsities Rush For Rankings Traced Back To Academic Imperialism

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He said the problem is not new, and goes back to the 80s when universities were used to nurture political support for certain leaders in the government at that time.
(MalaysiaNow) – Chandra Muzaffar says an obsession with global rankings has a role in the overall decline of local universities, but it also reflects Malaysia’s status-conscious society.
An obsession with world rankings as well as the absence of efforts to eradicate academic fraud have been cited as the reasons behind the deterioration of Malaysia’s higher education standards, says a prominent social critic in the wake of a new finding seen as damaging to Malaysian universities.
Chandra Muzaffar, a former academic who made headlines in the late 1990s when he was sacked as a professor by Universiti Malaya, said no serious attention had been paid to addressing the deterioration of Malaysia’s higher education standards, which he said could be traced back to the 80s.
“There is a mix-up in priorities where we are more concerned about rankings. If you look at universities abroad, when they were developing they were not crazy about rankings,” he told MalaysiaNow.
On Sunday, MalaysiaNow cited the findings of two professors from the Czech Republic, which among others placed Malaysian academics alongside other top authors whose works were published in more than 300 “predatory journals”, or publications with questionable content and editorial standards which often accept articles for a fee.
A total of 324 such journals published from across the world were found to have infiltrated Scopus, a Netherlands-based global citation database used as a benchmark by global university ranking agencies in evaluating universities worldwide.
Ranking craze
Chandra said the fixation of local universities on getting better rankings was a recent development, which had led to a rush to publish research works and to get cited in academic databases.
Chandra Muzaffar “This craziness about rankings is a very recent thing.
“I see this as part of a larger imperial game to depict certain universities as subordinates. This is actually to perpetuate the dominance of certain mainly Western universities,” he said.
“Portraying these universities as the acme of excellence is aimed at ensuring that the ideas, individuals and courses associated with them remain as the standard bearers of knowledge.” Read more here

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