Soaring into the future we want

Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
My View - The Sun Daily
October 28, 2015

MANY were privileged to listen to Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh, minister of higher education, extolling the tagline "soaring upwards" in a special lecture last week at the Razak School of Government (RSOG) at Putrajaya. It is part of the RSOG's knowledge platform where leaders are invited to have a discourse with the audience on issues of interest.

The tagline seems to have caught on among students, staff and the ministry officials with a renewed sense of confidence that things are "taking off" as it were. The minister illustrated this in a candid presentation backed by data and statistics indicating that the "soaring" has indeed begun. In some cases it is convincing, while in others it is off to a slow but sure start. Overall the prospect looks rather bullish especially among the "older" universities – which incidentally are also research (-intensive) universities – with University of Malaya (UM) in the lead. This cannot be more apparent when it comes to its performance in the discipline of engineering where UM stands tall among its peers. In some cases doing better much to the surprise of the audience.

Admittedly, there is a long way to go to ensure that the "soaring" continues higher and higher. There are still some gaps that need to be closed before quality could be "assured" as a matter of course which were frankly highlighted and later discussed. In parts the "soaring" can be attributed to the target(s) set within the framework of "ranking" and the "league tables". While agreeing "ranking" is not everything, it somehow drew much attention underscored by the outcomes provided largely by a particular ranking company. Still, the explanation was convincing although others might raise eyebrows as to the choice of the company. Some months back, another company voiced its unhappiness that Malaysian universities were not participating in the type of ranking it was promoting, alluding to the fact the other types of ranking were relatively "easy". But this is what ranking is all about, a commercially-driven exercise competing to have us believe what "quality" is according to them – based on some selected criteria that they deem fit which varies from interest to interest, and time to time. Unfortunately, most swallow this wholesale believing "what gets measured gets done!"

This being the case, I worry that the "soaring upwards" is more on course for the Red Sky, an analogy to the Red Ocean as in W. Chan Kim's Blue Ocean Strategy. It is a business-as-usual strategy of competing with the "best" as pre-determined by one particular league table. Moving up the rank could be interpreted as an improvement of sorts, but not necessarily a "transformation" espoused by the Education Blueprint.

In other words, the ultimate question that needs to be resolved is: where are we "soaring upwards" to? The red sky or the blue sky? The former, often associated with sunset, means that it is not sufficiently "sustainable" when taking into account the future challenges faced by education in the new millennium. In short, while the ecosystem of education is fast changing, the education sector is still sluggish in coping with rapid changes. Staring at the face is "education for sustainable development" that took root 10 years ago when the UN unveiled the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). More recently the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2030).

To date, none of the ranking exercises are emphatic on these criteria (although there a couple focusing on the "greenness" of campuses). Meaning to say, preoccupation with business-as-usual strategy within the red sky ranking framework will miss the transformative elements vital to ESD as highlighted in several global documents. This includes concern that some of the model institutions that we have chosen to emulate are themselves "unsustainable". Whereas the urgency today is to find the most suitable model that fits into "The future we want", implying that "soaring upwards" into the blue sky is imperative. It is instructive to note that when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was founded some 150 years ago, it adopted a novel approach for the world of higher learning – to cope with the emerging Industrial Revolution. In fact, several proposed mergers with "the other school up the river" were even shot down. Thus MIT is where it is now due to this courage to be boldly different.

Today we are well past the Industrial Age, indeed arguably in the Age of Sustainability. Should we not be thinking of something new, bold and different too – a higher purpose that we must "soar" towards. And at once assume a leadership role by making competition irrelevant, as W. Chan Kim advocates.