Singapore Universities - End of a Shameful Decade?

Restoring Authenticity in Our Universities

The coming of Professor Subra Suresh, the immediate past President of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), to be the new Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Universty (NTU) President from January 2018 augurs well for Singapore’s premier higher education institution. Professor Suresh’s 16-years tenure at CMU together with more than 25 years’ familiarity with NTU through joint research and networking with NTU Professors embolden him with a unique insight into the achievable authentic future impact of NTU. 

CMU is arguably among the very best private US Universities. CMU Professors are renowned for working collaboratively with students to solve major scientific, technological and societal challenges through a multidisciplinary approach and a distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business, public policy, fine arts, science and the humanities. CMU is a top-tier private global research university that infuses and challenges its students with curiosity and passion to deliver work that matters.

Founded in 1900, CMU has been the birthplace of innovation, as evident by groundbreaking research which yields new discoveries that impact people's lives. Its creativity shapes art, design, architecture and performance, from Broadway to Hollywood. New pedagogical approaches to learning support a University education that is both deep and inspiring, making CMU graduates among the most desirable to be recruited by some of the world's most transformative companies. CMU has become a global destination for organizations aspiring to be leaders in robotics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, additive manufacturing, and data science, among others. 

For me, this is a déjà vu from 2006! CMU is exactly the kind of University which NTU was aspiring and evolving to 10 years ago at the turn of the 21 century, before she was so deliberately disrupted and diverted towards the mindless pursuit of bogus quality standards of phony excellence. And I was there as an NTU Associate Professor, a live spectator and participant in the unfolding drama of surreal hypocrisy by suspended intelligence in epic proportions.

In 1991, NTU became a full-fledged University with the visionary mandate “To Be The University of Business and Industry”. NTU focuses directly on serving the technological and skilled manpower needs of Singapore. This single-minded passion for excellence and service to Singapore’s development empowers and emboldens NTU and its sister institution NUS (National University of Singapore) to propel them into the 21st Century with increasing expectations of impact outcomes. Their impact have already attracted to Singapore many leading edge technology companies like Motorola, Phillips, Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Oracle among other global corporations.

By April 2001, NTU's research had resulted in 20 spin-off companies, many of whom funded by venture firms, and 150 disclosures, 76 patents filed and 30 patents granted. The research papers of its staff and students in refereed international journals also won numerous awards in international competitions and conferences. 

Strangely, these achievements were deemed below sub-par performance and condemned to the obscure 351-400 ranks of the presumptuous Shanghai-based Academic Ranking of World Universities [ARWU]. NTU in 2003 has been ranked 48 by QS [Quacquarelli Symonds], one of the major Universities rankers based in the United Kingdom. In 2006, NTU “slides” to 61 and by 2008 has “plunged” to 77! 

I remembered that day in 2008 when NTU’s fall from greatness, fully 29 places from 2003, was reported. Panic and pandemonium broke out among NTU senior Professors, Managers and students. To this day, it remained baffling and incomprehensible why none of the esteemed Professors in our Universities had bothered to examine the validity and reliability of the presumptuous “World Rankings Standard”. Many higher education experts, Professors and research scientists by that time had already questioned and condemned the dubious nature of the Standards and the spurious relationships of its various measurements.

Readers should note that over the past 14 years, neither THE [Times Higher Education] or QS Rankers have ever published the scientific basis of their “methodology”; especially the criterion factors selected as measures of “best” Universities, nor the population and samples of the respondents who participated in surveys purportedly conducted and whose “data” were used to compile the final annual rankings. 

Governments and institutions should ignore leading international university rankings because they are “unreliable” and “methodologically flawed”, according to a new analysis by the United Kingdom higher education think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute or HEPI. HEPI’s new research shows the data in league tables used by the Rankers are “unreliable and sometimes worse”, and it is “unwise and undesirable to give the league tables so much weight”. HEPI’s evidence shows that international rankings are one-dimensional, measuring research activity to the exclusion of almost everything else. 

HEPI concluded that “Rankings are a massive joke that do not sufficiently take into account teaching quality and are easily gamed” and that “they do not match the claims made for them. They fail to identify the ‘best’ universities in the world, given the numerous functions universities fulfil that do not feature in the ranking. Indeed, what is arguably their most important activity – educating students – is omitted.”

The United Nations education body, UNESCO, has concluded earlier that “these rankings are of dubious value, are underpinned by questionable social science, arbitrarily privilege particular indicators, and use shallow proxies as correlates of quality”

A European Government-commissioned study also concluded that top World Universities Rankings Standards are so based on dubious data and subjective weightings of factors that they are useless as a basis for information if the goal is to improve higher education.  “Useless” is its verdict after a thorough and in-depth decomposition of a popular World Universities Ranking Standard.

Read this - Public Warning: DO NOT Trust Universities Rankings.

UNESCO together with most University Professors and Academics generally consider the World Universities Ranking Standards to be Bogus Ranking Standards of Dubious Excellence because of its flawed methodology.

The London-based QS World Universities Ranking has been called “a Fraud on the public.” Another Eminent Professor said: “QS simply doesn’t do as good a job as the other rankers that are using multiple indicators”. The Eminent Professor Simon Marginson of then Melbourne University remarked that: “I do think social science-wise, it’s so weak that you can’t take the results seriously”. Specifically, “the QS methodology is not sufficiently robust to provide data valid as social science”. He specializes in higher education, and comparative and international education, as one of the most highly cited social science researchers in the world in these fields.

World Universities Ranking Standards are a global multi-billion dollar industry. A higher ranking translates to University fees from more unsuspecting students especially from the emergent rich developing countries from China, India and East Asia. To the Vendors, it means revenue from consultancy, publications and media exposure. To Government Regulators, higher Universities rankings are often hailed as successful higher education policies and management, never mind often at the expense of fewer local potential students. For Universities Administrators and Managers, they represent profitable performance results, never mind that the Standards have little, often nothing, to do with their Universities’ learning mission outcome.

For potential students and their parents, the World Universities Ranking Standards represent a convenient solution to the difficult task of University choice for their children, never mind that they had invented and perpetuated the Myth of “One Best University” as well as the obvious Big Lie that “One University Fits All” regardless of your child’s interests, subject preference, learning ability and career choice. Because these students and their parents do not know better, they became easy victims to the predators of True Big Lies and Delusions about Universities Ranking Standards. 

So in 2008, an external, profit-making, foreign, non-academic organization adjudged and condemned NTU to pariah status, after we have nurtured thousands of Singaporeans (and non-Singaporeans) and transform them into top-class engineering, science, business, social science and other professional graduates in great demand by renowned global corporations, and who have decisively contributed to Singapore’s economic and social development journey from 3rd World to 1st World. 

In 2007, NTU hired Professor Bertil Andersson as Provost, and later became its President in 2011. Professor Andersson is a renown Swedish biochemist who has pioneered research on the artificial leaf, a promising area of sustainable energy research that uses sunlight to produce clean, low-cost sources of energy. He is also the President of Linkoping University in Sweden from 1999-2003. Coincidentally, Linkoping University was also relegated in 2003 to the same 351-400 ranking band as NTU by the Shanghai-based ARWU where it languished for quite a while before creeping up to 287, even as NTU progresses to 123 in 2017. 

Over the past 10 years, my professional deduction is that NTU Professor Bertil Andersson presides over a University suffering from low self-esteem as she becomes lost and misdirected, allowing herself to be fooled into compliance with a bogus quality ranking standard instead of focusing on its core mission to empower Singapore’s development through skilled manpower, innovations, new ventures and entrepreneurship.  

What exactly did NTU do wrong from 1991-2006?

Here’s a list of NTU’s “sins” in the eyes of the nonprofessional University Rankers:

1)  NOT ENOUGH FOREIGN Students: NTU had mostly (more than 94%) Singaporean Students.

2)  NOT ENOUGH FOREIGN Professors: NTU had NOT hired more Foreign Professors.

3)  TOO MANY STUDENTS: NTU had High Students-Staff Ratio.

4)  TOO MUCH EMPHASIS ON INVENTIONS AND SPIN-OFF COMPANIES: NTU had too many Research Papers with Low Citations.

5)  REPUTATIONAL SURVEY: NTU was unknown to many academics outside Singapore.

Did NTU decide to “game” the Rankers’ evaluation system?

To satisfy the Rankers’ preference for foreign students and faculty members, NTU embarked on a systematic purge of local Professors, never mind that many are tenured, have accomplished internationally, and have served the University with distinction, and denied admission to many qualified Singaporeans by increasing foreign students admission, and forcing those from better income families to seek admissions to, ironically, top Universities overseas.

Some laws are also possibly broken with regard to the constitutional protection of Singaporean Professors from age discrimination, but no one in authority really cares enough to intervene in the irrational, mindless and bloody frenzy of the cultural revolution which spares nothing for the sake of meeting the Criteria of what the United Nations’ UNESCO has already adjudged to be a Bogus Ranking Standard of Dubious Excellence, in order to obtain a Brand of Questionable Authenticity.

A few hundred Singaporean Professors were purged from 2007 to beyond 2010. And more than 6,500 Singaporean students, or about 1,700-1,900 annually, were denied NTU admission through an arbitrary cut-off point into various 3-year and 4-year Undergraduate Programs from 2009-2013 for their places to be allocated to preferred foreign students.

Finally by 2014, NTU was ranked as the Top Youngest University in the World by QS Ranker, and ranking just 39th Worldwide. Indeed, what a “climb” from 77th in 2008! By 2013, foreign students made up 28% of the total undergraduate population from just 5% less than a decade earlier. By the end of the cultural revolutionary purge of Singaporean Professors and staff in 2010, NTU proudly announced that Singapore Professors, including new Singapore citizens, formed ONLY 44% of the faculty with 56% of NTU faculty being foreigners from 56 countries worldwide including Singapore Permanent Residents. Never mind the fact that most Universities in the World actually have a majority of local Professors, even in the top Universities.

Given the dodgy nature of World University Rankings and their questionable deliberate fabrication of unreliably unscientific methodologies, NTU victories to their top ranks are in essence as pyrrhic as winning a beauty contest; the mere appearance of uncertain meaningless quality.  Indeed, what a wasteful use of time, management and financial resources!

Never in the history of Singapore has so many Singaporeans been forced to become collateral sacrifices in return for nothing of any value to our nation or the world. 

Singapore is an exceptional nation deserving of acting responsibly in order to be taken seriously by other nations. The Government should direct our Universities to ignore the Big Lie of World Universities Ranking Standards. Even Nunzio Quacquarelli, the Founder of QS, has publicly urged that Governments should Ignore QS Rankings precisely because they were never intended for strategic education policy use. NTU Trustees should also heed HEPI advice that universities, their governing bodies and governments should “focus on their core functions because it is the right thing to do, not because it may improve their position in any rankings”.

Over the past decade of shame, NTU has re-directed its energy and resource to satisfy the bogus criteria/standard of dubious University excellence purveyed by Rankers such as QS and THE. And as NTU improves on its meaningless Rankings on the QS and THE, her earlier (1991-2003, remember?) highly visible impact of entrepreneurship, patents, innovations and spin-off companies disappeared from its list of true achievements, never to return.  

The impact of NTU and NUS on Singapore students and society cannot be measured by the dubious proxies of excellence defined by bogus “World University Ranking” Standards. It can only be measured in terms of their contribution to the happiness and well-being of stakeholders and of the Singaporean and global communities to which we belong and serve.

A University’s contribution to society is its sufficient measure.

The important thing is to let other people think whatever they want, and not to lose one’s self-esteem by letting others diminish the accolades of our genuine acclaims and true achievements, so that we can grant them our excellent reputation of authenticity and honesty to conceal their lack of credibility, validity and reliability. It is more important what we think of our own Universities and what they have achieved for our young people, our communities and our nation. What others think of us using irrelevant and bogus criteria should not make us so unhappy to drive us to desperate unthinking shameful actions.

We should stop participating in the essentially beauty contests of the fraudulent World Universities Rankings, so as to stop lending them our credibility by endorsing bogus standards of dubious quality excellence.

In 2018, a new era must begin in Singapore Universities with Professor Subra Suresh as NTU President. The first step should be to cease reliance on and pursuit of a bogus standard of questionable excellence. We must return to authentic impact as the measure of excellence for our premier institutions of higher learning. The determination to restore authenticity depends only on visionary transformational leadership in our institutions backed by enlightened political courage in the government. For the sake of future generations and the fate of Singapore, failure to discard the University rankings scourge from the minds of University Administrators is not optional. We either do or die trying; it’s between sustainable existential survival and devolving into oblivion. Dare we not succeed? Time will tell.

Related Articles:

UNESCO - University Rankings of Dubious Value

International University Rankings: For Good or Ill?

Why We Should Not Trust Global University League Tables

Universities Ranking - How Important Are They?

"Useless" - Official Study Slams University Rankings

2015 World Universities Rankings – Using The Big Lie to Perpetuate Fraud and Myth of Excellence.

Singapore in World Universities Rankings Fraud

Singapore NTU is Number 1 University

Seduction of World University Rankings

Laws Broken for Top Universities Rankings

Singaporean Students and Professors Sacrificed for Top Universities Rankings

True Lies about World Universities Ranking     

Were Singaporean Students and Professors Sacrificed for Top NTU Rankings?

QS - Governments should Ignore Rankings

QS Ranking Methodology

QS Droppd by THES for Methodological Reasons

Sale of Dubious QS-Stars

QS Consultancy to Rise Up Ranking

QS Showcase Opportunities for Branding

QS Reputational Survey Has Weak Protocols

QS Use of Unlicensed Software

QS Ranking - A Fraud on the Public

Scrutiny of QS Universities Ranking

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