“We cannot be ‘ranked’ against other universities whose ‘conditions’ and ‘environments’ are different from ours. It is like comparing apples with oranges… We do not want to be obsessive about world rankings” – Higher Education Minister Mohd Khaled Nordin.

The Minister is right.

Whether its Times or Shanghai Jiao Tong or QS World, they formulate their world rankings benchmarked their criteria – eg peer review of academics, opinion of Global employers, composition of academic staff and students (foreign vs local) staff student ratio, research citations per head of academic faculty, resources, academic achievements of students etc – against world’s best practices. And the World’s Best Practices are bias in favour of Meritocracy ala Western perspectives. The Global research conversations from which their findings are made are conducted largely in English. As English is the global language, more emphasis may be placed by people evaluating on research publications in English.
We on the other hand emphasize on the National Language.

We also emphasize on religion. It is the top on the list of RukuNegara. More importantly our politicians and policy makers emphasize on the socio-economic re-engineering goals of the NEP. This is reflected throughout the education system leading right up to tertiary institutions. Being ranked high by these international bodies is of course desired but not at the price of de-railing our affirmative policy goals. It is our deliberate policy to choose mediocrity over meritocracy by reason of our socio-economic re-engineering imperatives. Which country whose universities have been surveyed have our equivalent of race based NEP? It is not for nothing the standard joke that after South Africa we are the sole remaining apartheid in the world.

For an “apartheid” nation, then our universities have, in spite of this baggage of nationalism of language and deliberate political priority on affirmative mediocrity, scored very well indeed.

In fact we should, by our own unique ‘1 Malaysia’s benchmarks be ranked first – amongst countries:-

• that have such affirmative race based policies abjuring meritocracy for mediocrity;

• whose students and academic staff in universities can speak several languages, Bahasa, Mandarin Arabic and English and dialects;

• that religion is prioritized to make university students holistic in moral behaviour and values;

• creativity in application of knowledge after university training in law – ie proposing a person can self strangulate…

We may well rank first because we’re the only unique country and there’s no other country in parallel positions of such features for comparisons of their universities with ours.

Our defence is simple: Times or Shanghai Jiao Tong or QS World are bias in favour of English language, Western values and standards of what’s the best practice. It is due to the Anglo American white global hegemonic influence of standards world wide. (Thats why by their standards their top universities by majority rank high on these lists). We defer to these ranking only if we need for pragmatic reason their multinationals to employ our graduates – otherwise they’re rubbish!

Not all people in Malaysia, let alone the world, share common world view and subscribe to Anglo American Global standard of what is excellence in academic standards.

(Which is why Samuel P. Huntington has the opportunity to say so much in his “Clash of Civilisation’ that is being studied and reviewed amongst academic circles of top universities (by QS World University rankings)!

One may note that in our country – even between the Pakatan Rakat’s politicians – there is no common view.

And it is the DAP’s supremo and not PAS’s Nik Aziz who berates the government about MU’s falling world rankings.

Just imagine the hypothetical scenario of BN being replaced by PR and supposing in that scenario PAS’s top politicians happen to hold the PM or higher Education Minister’s posts.

Do we expect that they worry if MU falls further out of the top 300 ranking determined if say preponderantly by the Anglo American Global standard that we here think is universal or global???

They will more likely ask “if QS World Rankings is so accurate, how come Al-Azhar University is not listed amongst the top?

And how could the criteria that determine Cambridge and Harvard as top 2 forget to include religious syllabus (whatever religion) as mandatory or sex-segregated campus facilities necessary for moral development of tertiary students to provide them a holistic education and preparedness for the world outside???

Sorry typo error in last para, let me rephrase – “there’s simply no agreement that even for a simple thing like how to rank a University of its merits, there IS A COMMON acceptance world wide of the bench-marks or the values that underpin these benchmarks”.