MALAYSIA: Universities must help find talent overseas

Honey Singh Virdee and Yojana Sharma
19 December 2010, University World News
Issue: 152

Universities and professors will join the ministry of education to support Malaysia's much-vaunted 'Talent Corporation', officially launched this month by Prime Minister Najib Razak to woo skilled workers to the country, particularly in the science and research sectors.

Higher Education Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin has said the ministry would provide guidelines to public universities on how to spot and bring home academic talent.

"It will be a key performance indicator for public universities as we can gauge the strength of their [international] networking," Nordin said.

He added that the country would benefit from overseas academics' extensive networks and also their "publishing history", a key measure in international university rankings. They would also "improve the local academic culture and raise the rankings of local universities".

Ministry guidelines already say that foreign academics must constitute 20% of a research university's faculty.

The academic community will advise the government through the National Professors' Council formed by the prime minister in April this year. The Council comprises some 1,426 professors from all of the country's public higher education institutions.

Council chairman Zakri Adul Hamid, who is also Science Advisor to the prime minister, said he hoped the Talent Corporation would attract and retain "the most talented research scientists and engineers".

Council deputy chairman Shansul Amri Baharuddin said it was hoped initiatives to attract talent were "not just focusing on the researchers, scientists and engineers but also should include the social sciences and the humanities".

The Talent Corporation was formed to coordinate the policies of different ministries and departments including Higher Education, Science, Economics and Immigration.

The initiative focuses on Malaysians currently living abroad but will also include other foreign academics looking to further their careers.

Among the key initiatives to bring "world class talents" to Malaysia will be the introduction of a residency pass in April 2011, which will not require the holder to be tied to a specific employer to remain in the country. The 10-year limit for foreigners to work in Malaysia is also being relaxed.

"Some countries are offering a lot of incentives to attract talent," said Professor Zaini Ujang, Vice-chancellor of Universiti Technologi Malaysia. "Malaysia is offering not just jobs but also residence, research facilities and research partnerships."

But some are sceptical that the policies can reverse the brain drain of recent years, let alone set the country on the path to becoming a high income country by 2020, which is the prime minister's stated goal.

"Malaysia at the moment is trying to transform itself into a centre for education excellence and is internationalising higher education," said Noorsaadah Addul-Rahman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Malaya.

"But it is not clear what the objectives and functions of the Talent Corporation are. They are looking to bring in talent from outside. We are also doing that at our university but we have to train our own talent as well, we can't forever be bringing in brains from outside," Abdul-Rahman told University World News.

The country's previous Brain Gain Malaysia, managed by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation from 2006 on, and before that the Returning Expert programme launched in 2001, attracted fewer than 3,000 applicants, despite offering incentives such as tax exemptions and access to permanent residency for foreign spouses.

Only around 1,050 "networking scientists and knowledge workers" were brought into the country under Brain Gain Malaysia in the last four years and some of them may have since returned abroad.

"Brain Gain Malaysia was almost like the Talent Corporation but it was not successful. We have to provide the infrastructure and the environment for returning academics and researchers, apart from the money," said Abdul-Rahman.

She said Malaysia could be in competition with Singapore and China, which have similar policies to lure back talent. But she said Singapore had good research infrastructure to attract people from abroad, including excellent laboratories, while China was concentrating its efforts on a small number of universities upgrading the facilities to world-class standards to attract back top professors.

According to officials some 700,000 Malaysians are living abroad, around half of them in Singapore, with sizeable diasporas also in Australia, Britain and the US. Many companies complain of a lack of skilled workers and the government sees it as hindering its efforts to attract high-technology industries.

GLOBAL: Australia and South Africa pay top salaries

Geoff Maslen
19 December 2010, University World News
Issue: 152

It might come as a surprise to academics in South Africa but the purchasing power of their salaries, on average, is now higher than that of their counterparts in Canada, the UK and New Zealand, according to a survey of 46 Commonwealth universities. However South African academics earn 6% less than those in Australia - the top-ranked country when cost of living is taken into account.

At the same time, South Africa has the highest salary scales relative to national gross domestic product per capita and the overall average academic salary is seven times the GDP per capita. This is perhaps not surprising for a developing country where joblessness is high and average per capita income is low, and where there are deep inequalities between rich and poor.

The survey, taken over the past 12 months found that differences in average salaries between countries had reduced since the last survey three years ago. This suggests increased international competition for academic staff as well as efforts within individual countries to improve academic salary levels.

A report of the survey says the rate of growth in salaries in Canada, the UK and New Zealand has been higher than in Australia since the last survey. South Africa experienced the highest growth rate with a 51% increase over the past three years, but the report says this could be related to increased investment in higher education and efforts to restructure the sector, as well as high levels of inflation.

The survey was the seventh undertaken by the Association of Commonwealth Universities. The results take account of academic salary scales and associated benefits in 46 institutions across seven Commonwealth countries: Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and the UK.

Provision of discretionary bonuses or market adjustments has increased significantly from the previous survey and is now offered at 63% of institutions compared with 41% in 2006-07, the report says. Several institutions also highlight specific recruitment and retention strategies, further pointing to the increased importance of attracting and retaining academic staff.

Australian universities continue to have some of the best pension and leave conditions, while Malaysia is notable for its extensive use of additional benefits on top of base salaries. These include set entertainment and housing benefits, as well as generous medical entitlements for employees and their dependents.

The report says 41 institutions in seven Commonwealth countries responded to the survey. Salary scales for academic staff were compared from point of entry up to professorial level and public sources provided information and data for an additional five universities in New Zealand.

Salary scales were analysed using a purchasing power parity conversion rate - the Big Mac Index - expressing all salaries in US dollars. For comparison of salary levels across the participating countries and over time, average salary levels were calculated.

The report says the PPP conversion factor incorporates the cost of living so salaries purchase the same goods and services in compared countries. Using a PPP conversion factor provides a more balanced basis for the international comparison of salary values than market exchange rates which are relatively volatile and do not reflect the cost of living in the countries concerned.

Participating countries were ranked according to their overall midpoint average, the arithmetic mean of the top and bottom of each scale averaged across all responses.

Australian academic salaries, at all levels except lecturer, continue to be above those of the other responding countries when cost of living was factored into the equation, the report says. The overall midpoint average of the Australian academic salary scales is US$83,670 or 6.4% higher than South Africa, the new second-placed country in the ranking.

The report says that had Singapore been included, it would have ranked highest of all participating countries, with overall midpoint average salaries 30% above Australia. But Singapore has not participated in the survey since the beginning of the 2000s and, because its sample this year was not representative, it was excluded.

South Africa ranks second overall with an average of PPP US$78,653 while Canada and the UK are in third and fourth place respectively. This is in contrast to the survey in 2006-07 when South Africa was at the bottom of the ranking.

Canada has an overall average salary of US$76,594, closely followed by the UK with US$76,377. New Zealand (US$68,863) ranks fifth when purchasing power is considered but the gap with its geographical neighbor, Australia, has narrowed considerably rising from 40% in 2006-07 to 21.5% in this survey.

South Africa has the highest salary scales relative to national GDP per capita (the overall average academic salary is seven times the GDP per capita) and also saw the highest level of growth in academic salary scales since the last survey (51%).

The report highlights the differences between the countries in setting academic salaries by examining individual countries' higher education funding and salary determination mechanisms. It also discusses salary negotiations and attraction and retention issues, as well as the internationalisation of higher education.

In Canada, provinces are responsible for funding while the eight main universities in New Zealand are state-owned. The report says this may contribute to the high diversity in salary levels in Canada and the relatively uniform levels of pay in New Zealand.

In South Africa, the large diversity in salary levels is due to the relatively high level of institutional autonomy while academics in public universities in Malaysia are part of the civil service, resulting in a relatively low impact on salary levels.

The report says these issues are particularly relevant as growing pressures on universities in terms of funding and accountability - intensified by the global economic crisis - have generated varied responses from the countries in the survey. This, in turn, may affect the level of pay for academics.

What Are Books Good For?

September 26, 2010, Chronicle Review

Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review

Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review

By William Germano

I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.

Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them?

In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and its appearance on various materials. The second was the development during the first years of the Christian era of the codex—the thing with pages and a cover—first as a supplement and eventually as a replacement for the older technology of the scroll. The third was what we think of as the Gutenberg moment, the European deployment of movable type, in the 15th century. And the fourth is, of course, the digital revolution in the middle of which we find ourselves today.

When we say "book," we hear the name of a physical object, even if we're thinking outside the codex. The codex bound text in a particular way, organizing words into pages, and as a result literally reframed ideas. The static text image on my desktop is the electronic cousin of late antiquity's reading invention. When my screen is still, or when I arrange text into two or four pages, like so much visual real estate, I am replicating a medieval codex, unbinding its beautifully illuminated pages. Yet reading digitally is also a scroll-like engagement—the fact that we "scroll down" connects us to a reading practice that dates back several millennia. One of the things that book historians study is the change in, and persistence of, reading technologies over time, and what those historians have demonstrated is that good technologies don't eradicate earlier good technologies. They overlap with them—or morph, so that the old and the new may persist alongside yet another development. Think Post-its, printed books, PC's, and iPads, all in the same office cubicle.

The book has a long history, but the concept of the "history of the book" is comparatively new. In the 1950s, two Frenchmen—Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin—brought out L'apparition du livre, or, in English, The Coming of the Book, a work of scholarship that became one of the signs marking the arrival of a new scholarly discipline. Book history's objective was analysis of the function of the book in European culture, and since the 1970s, it has continually expanded its scope, emerging as a trading zone among various disciplines, a rare scholarly arena where the work of librarians, archivists, and scholarly publishers can intersect with the work of traditional scholars and theorists, all members of what the economist Fritz Machlup termed the "knowledge industry."

In the long night of culture, we knowledge workers are restless sleepers. We need dreamers—in technology and science as well as the arts. Right now we are walking through two great dreams that are shaping the future of scholarship, even the very idea of scholarship and the role "the book" should play within it.

Great Dream No. 1 is universal access to knowledge. The cry to open the doors to information is heard everywhere. This dream means many things to many people, but for knowledge workers it means that scholarly books and journals can, and therefore should, be made available to all users. New technologies make that possible for the first time in human history, and as the argument goes, the existence of such possibilities obligates us to use them.

Great Dream No. 2 is the ideal of knowledge building as a self-correcting, collective exercise. Twenty years ago, nobody had Wikipedia, but when it arrived it took over the hearts and laptops of undergraduate students, and then of everyone else in the education business. Professional academic life would be poorer, or at least much slower, without it. The central premise of Wikipedia isn't speed but infinite self-correction, perpetually fine-tuning what we know. In our second dream, we expand our aggregated knowledge, quantitatively and qualitatively.

These two great dreams—the universal and the collective—should sound very familiar, since they are fundamentally the latest entries in Western culture's utopian tradition: Thomas More's Utopia, the Enlightenment's rational distribution of freedoms, Karl Marx's reorganization of labor. But their dark side—the troubling lump in the mattress—is the problem of books themselves, a problem always framed around the physical book and its limitations. The physical book takes up space, it may cost too much to buy and to make, it is heavy, only one person can read it at a time. Books deplete the greenery of our graying planet. Besides, the world and its technologies have replaced book reading with a quick dip into an electronic resource.

Against all that, there are classic arguments in favor of the book. Consider four.

The epistemological argument: Books are the material evidence of what we know. They are knowledge, and through them we discover what we know and who we are.

The cautionary or monitory argument: In their function as record-keepers, books transform history into the present and the present into history. Books cause us to remember and to prevent future generations from forgetting or misunderstanding us and the long collective story of particulars.

The technological argument: No predigital means of transmission has been as effective as the codex. Books don't need batteries. They're cheap in the scheme of things, and remarkably permanent. They travel well. The so-called invention of distance education, in the mid-20th century, was preceded at least 1,500 years earlier by books sent long distances from one early Christian community to another.

The autobiographical argument: Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. This last argument has been given less respect than it might. Great and fancy libraries astound us, but it's the personal library where a scholar's serious work begins. Lose the personal library, and we become less than we are.

Those are four good arguments. But they don't make my case for books.

In 2009, Robert Darnton, formerly a professor of history at Princeton University and now director of the Harvard University Library, published a volume of more than three decades of essays, titled The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs). Perhaps more than any others, those essays have helped shape the current conversation about books and scholarship, their history and their future. In essence, The Case for Books has naturalized an argument that the Enlightenment's Republic of Letters—with its democratic vista lined with books available to all comers—may be reinvented in the 21st century. Darnton helps us see the connection between "a republic of learning" and a republic of electronic letters. His thoughtful case falls short—how could it not?—of proposing a solution to the competing interests of the market and the user. But we need visions, which by definition lack the fine print that makes the wonderful possible.

The Enlightenment's concerns with spreading light and learning are amply demonstrated in the Darntonian vision of a digital democracy. Both celebrate the luminosity of knowledge, shining forth through the written word. I'm struck, though, by the word "case" in the title of The Case for Books. In arguing his case for books, the author makes reference to cases of historical archives and to the various legal cases surrounding copyright protection.

But there are other relevant uses of the word "case." One would have been familiar to publishers for the 100 years before computers reinvented first printing and then publishing. When the term "case" entered the book trade, at the end of the 19th century, it described what we today might call a binder. The purchaser could use the case to store issues of a journal or other periodical publications. (Twentieth-century English publishers developed the habit of referring to their hardcover books as published in cased editions, as if the text were free-standing and the pages likely to wander off on their own.) Books had been bound in leather for centuries, but for 19th-century English printers engaged in mass production for a general audience, they were encased between what rare-book dealers and some publishers refer to as the top and bottom boards of a book. To the working publisher circa 1950, the case for books was not the Darntonian vision of the ultimate digital repository but a simple covering, a protective armature.

There are earlier uses of the word "case" as well. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an earlier case from an Elizabethan devotional tract that warned, "Every mans case is the skinne of a sinner." The pious writer meant that we are not only sinners, we also are containers stuffed with sin—sort of sin sausages. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Egyptian queen bids her servants leave Marc Antony's corpse at the Monument: "Come, away," she tells them. "This case of that huge spirit now is cold." Cleopatra's words confirm the distinction between the box that contains our life and the life within it.

Is the book the physical, printed text in its protective case, or is it the knowledge that the hidden text is always prepared to reveal? The answer, of course, is that the book is both. And because the book is and is not the form in which it is presented, it can do its work between boards of calf, or morocco, or Kivar, or from the booklike window of an iPad or a Nook.

So what are books good for? My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down the challenge of "two cultures," the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isn't infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books tell scholarly stories.

Storytelling is central to the work of the narrative-driven disciplines­—the humanities and the nonquantitative social sciences—and it is central to the communicative pleasures of reading. Even argument is a form of narrative. Different kinds of books are, of course, good for different things. Some should be created only for download and occasional access, as in the case of most reference projects, which these days are born digital or at least given dual passports. But scholarly writing requires narrative fortitude, on the part of writer and reader. There is nothing wiki about the last set of Cambridge University Press monographs I purchased, and in each I encounter an individual speaking subject.

Each single-author book is immensely particular, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it. Scholarship is a collagist, building the next iteration of what we know book by book. Stories end, and that, I think, is a very good thing. A single authorial voice is a kind of performance, with an audience of one at a time, and no performance should outstay its welcome. Because a book must end, it must have a shape, the arc of thought that demonstrates not only the writer's command of her or his subject but also that writer's respect for the reader. A book is its own set of bookends.

Even if a book is published or disseminated in digital form, freed from its materiality, that shaping case of the codex is the ghost in the knowledge-machine. We are the case for books. Our bodies hold the capacity to generate thousands of ideas, perhaps even a couple of full-length monographs, and maybe a trade book or two. If we can get them right, books are luminous versions of our ideas, bound by narrative structure so that others can encounter those better, smarter versions of us on the page or screen. Books make the case for us, for the identity of the individual as an embodiment of thinking in the world. The heart of what even scholars do is the endless task of making that world visible again and again by telling stories, complicated, nuanced, subtle stories that reshape us daily so that new forms of knowledge can shine out.

William Germano is dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A longer version of this essay was presented as a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses this summer.