The government’s political will to boost the quality of higher
education in the country should be applauded. State budgets allocated
for education seem to have reached the right target – the empowerment
of both state and private universities so as to attain the status of
word-class universities.
With the growing awareness of the importance of competing with universities overseas, the Ministry of Education has been serious in its efforts to be a partner in higher education in the country as a fund-granting body. Research funds have been made available and prioritized for the purpose of reviving the spirit of the long-abandoned research tradition.
Moreover, scholarly journal publication in universities has been supported to attain national accreditation. And, accredited journals have been granted financial support to attain international status. No less important, training for novice writers on how to write and publish an article in an international journal has been extensively conducted under the auspices of the Education Ministry.
All of these aggressive endeavors augur well for the future of higher education here. It is indisputable to say that to be listed as one of the world’s top universities, universities in the country need to be at the forefront of research dissemination. That is to say that a university should always be the initiator of research activities.
Research publication via internationally recognized journals, after all, becomes the ultimate goal for a university here to be recognized as a world-class university. It is through international scholarly publication that a citation index of university teaching staff can be tangibly measured.
It is important to highlight here that the citation index has been used by The Times Higher Education Supplement as one of the criteria for qualifying a university as a world-class university.
Much of what has been done by the Education Ministry to uplift the quality of education is indicative of a bright prospect of the country’s universities to compete with overseas universities.
Despite this prospect, however, challenges always remain. Like most universities in Asian countries such as Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, the biggest challenge we are facing to reach the top as world-class universities is to gain recognition through international publication.
It is well-established that international academic publication has notoriously been the hegemonic control of Western ideology, which serves as active mechanisms for filtering knowledge. Thus, conformity to academic conventions imposed on by this ideology is deemed an absolute prerequisite for the acceptance of scholarly writings in a journal, while non-conformity to them will be labeled outsiders.
Most universities in Japan, Singapore and South Korea have been relatively successful in the struggle for international publication. Despite efforts in running the risk of rejection because of their status as outsiders, these countries have proven that their scholars have managed to make a breakthrough through international journal publication. In the field of English language teaching, for example, scholarly journals are beginning to be dominated by scholars from the countries.
The relative success of the universities in these countries is often attributed to their progressive moves of building up communities of knowledge construction instead of knowledge consumption among the academia.
Thus, with the hegemony of Western publishing ideology, what we need now, as the experience of the aforementioned countries has told us, is a shift in perspective from knowledge consumption and reproduction to knowledge construction community.
It becomes clear then that to compete with Western intellectual traditions needs more than just the government’s political will to provide funding for scientific research. What is pressing now is a radical move by the universities to support their staff to engage in a community of knowledge construction.
What has been proposed above sounds ambitious, but it is only a statement of intent that may not be possible to be realized overnight. It is a true challenge that our universities (both private and state) are facing today.
The writer is associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He is chief editor of Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching and can be contacted at setiono.sugiharto@atmajaya.ac.id.
