Research on the tertiary level

One reason even our top universities do not make it to the list of the top 200 in the world is the lack of world-class academic research being undertaken in our country.

We have individuals that have made waves abroad with their research; there is no question about that. But our universities, as a whole, are not known for their research. In fact, we do not really have a research university.

The term “research university” was first coined by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in 1967 in a study of American universities. It was dropped in 2000 in favor of more precise classifications, such as Humanities/Social Sciences (HSS) Dominant; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Dominant; and Professions Dominant.

Nevertheless, most academics still classify certain universities as “Doctoral/Research Universities,” by which they mean institutions that award at least 20 doctoral degrees each a year (not counting MD). The degrees offer one objective proof that the university engages in what Carnegie calls “high or very high research activity.”

Another objective proof lies within the criteria used by the various university ranking organizations, such as QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited, Times Higher Education, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. These rankers include research output as a major factor in the academic health of an institution. Research output is usually measured by the number of citations an institution’s faculty gets in learned journals listed in either Thomson Reuters ISI or Scopus. (We are often contented with counting faculty publications rather than faculty citations.)

Last week, the Philippine Association of Institutions for Research (PAIR) asked me to give a keynote lecture during their National Conference for Quality Assurance in International Journal Publications and Sustainable Research Management at Our Lady of Fatima University. Allow me to summarize some of the points I raised in that lecture. I began by outlining the current environment for research.

The research world is rapidly changing. Because we are no longer in a phase of the world’s development where ownership of land (the Agricultural Economy) or capital or labor is important (the Industrial Economy) but in an economy where knowledge as both product and tool is the determinant of wealth (the Knowledge Economy), universities have taken central stage. In the world, it is not landowners nor capitalists anymore that are crucial to the economy, but scholars. We have to produce a lot more research in our universities, therefore, if we are to join the rest of the international knowledge economy.

The Bologna Process has also raised the bar on research. What we now require of master’s thesis has to be required of undergraduate term papers. What we now expect of doctoral dissertations should be present in master’s theses; in practice, this means that all master’s theses should be publishable in part as articles in refereed journals. What we should now expect of doctoral dissertations is that they will be publishable as books by academic presses.

The Noynoy presidency, with its promise to add two more years to basic education, also will have a great impact on tertiary-level research. We can now expect incoming freshmen students to have taken such subjects as Calculus, Literary Theory, and Nuclear Physics (required subjects in high schools in other countries). That means that the level of teaching and learning in college will be much higher than it is now. Gone should be the days when we still have to teach college students how to write term papers, how to solve differential equations, or what String Theory is.

There is also CHED’s Technical Panel on General Education (TPGE), which will soon come out with a completely revised General Education Curriculum that will be more in step with that of most universities in the United States (European universities do not offer general education after high school). TPGE’s proposals will surely include research even in the first year of college.

CHED has also established a Journal Accreditation Service (JAS) that sets high standards for college journals. These standards, however, do not even come close to the standards set by ISI, which by the way is back as the measuring stick of the Times Higher Education Survey (it was the less-strict Scopus last year).

In short, the changes in the world and in the Philippines will force schools to do a lot more research than they are doing now, as well as to change the quality of student and faculty research from mere applied or practical research to basic and cutting-edge research. Whether they like to or not, universities have to redo their research agenda and think not only of themselves but of the rest of the world. Because of the Web, everything we do in our universities has to be seen in an international context. We are no longer competing just among ourselves, but regionally with Asia’s top three (the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the National University of Singapore), and the world’s three best (Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale).             (To be continued)