The world’s fastest-rising university is
neither in Europe nor in North America. It is in Asia; but neither in
China nor in India. It is in Singapore; not the National University of
Singapore but the Nangyang Technological University. Since 2003, when a
new President (i.e., Vice-Chancellor) took over the leadership of the
university, NTU has been climbing steadily in the ratings, especially
from 2010 to 2011 and from 2017 to 2018, when it jumped 122 places in
the world ranking, landing at 52 in the latest world ranking of
universities by Times Higher Education.
Nigerian university authorities have a
lot to learn from NTU’s rise, especially from the points of view of
leadership and governance; adequate funding; setting goals and achieving
them; and locating opportunities and seizing them.
NTU’s President from 2003 to 2011,
Professor Su Guaning, radically changed the fortunes of the university.
It is tempting to conclude that he was the Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore’s
university system. Just as Lee eschewed populist policies in favour of
long-term social and economic measures, Prof. Su eschewed the teaching
structure he inherited and put his faith in research and long-term
measures to make NTU a world-class university.
Right from the start, Su set his mind on
raising NTU’s profile by getting it to be one of the world’s top
universities. He began by surrounding himself with top senior people in
his administration, including hiring two reputable Deputies. One of them
was Prof. Bertil Andersson, who later became the university’s first
Provost. He devolved specific powers to his Deputies.
For example, Andersson was charged with
establishing a new faculty tenure system to ensure that only those who
were potentially productive in their research got tenure. Andersson had
wide international experience, including being a former University
Rector in Sweden and Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. He drew
on these experiences to change the focus of tenure from teaching to
research, with all the implications of increases in citations to faculty
publications and industrial outreach.
The government of Singapore worked hand
in hand with Su, funding the university as needed and providing
necessary facilities for improvement just as it continued to assist the
rival National University of Singapore. According to Su, the rivalry
between the two national universities was also an inspiration to him:
“If you look around the world, the best universities usually have
somebody competing with them on a similar level. If you take Stanford,
you have Berkeley. Take Cambridge, you have Oxford. Take Harvard, you
have MIT”. Incidentally, these are universities frequently in the top 10
in the world.
Su’s observation provides an oblique
commentary on Nigerian universities, where the often myopic management
often operates like an island unto itself. I often cringed whenever I
heard Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, introduced as the best
state university in Nigeria. I did not know what to make of it when
Lagos State University was also recently introduced as the best state
university in Nigeria. I could only ask myself: Do the authorities in
both universities ever talk to each other?
Another interesting aspect of Su’s
leadership is the maintenance of a dual system of hiring young people,
while also recognising age and experience as critical to the
university’s stability and growth. Young faculty could eventually
propagate the legacy of excellence, but older and more experienced
faculty have to grow it first. Accordingly, he worked hard on increasing
the retirement age by 10 years in order to provide further
opportunities for tapping into the experience of senior faculty.
One of the important qualities of
leadership is the ability to see far into the future and plan
accordingly. That was what Su did with regard to China. NTU quickly took
note of the significance of the rise of China and was ahead of the
curve in launching training and degree programmes in Chinese, including a
course on market-oriented economics for communist officials. The number
of Chinese Master’s programmes was increased, leading to a large cohort
of NTU alumni in China today. This raises an interesting question for
Nigerian university authorities. How many of them go to other African
countries to recruit students, like Ghana and South Africa do in
Nigeria?
At the same time, NTU broadened its
admission policy by increasing international students to about 20 per
cent of its undergraduate intake. Its 10,000-strong postgraduate
students are, however, mostly international students. It did not stop at
that. It also internationalised faculty hiring in order to develop a
melting pot of different but complementary perspectives. Although
already within the system, Andersson was eventually appointed, after an
international search, to succeed Su, thus guaranteeing continuity of the
strong tradition of excellence they both jointly developed. Needless to
say, Andersson is not native to Singapore.
Another factor in NTU’s favour is its
relative autonomy and academic freedom. The university decides on who
teaches what, how, where, and to whom. There are no outside regulatory
bodies and no unions to disrupt the academic calendar. There were, of
course, occasional intrusions of the government into some university
decisions. For example in 2013, there was a debate over academic freedom
in Singapore, when Associate Professor Cherian George of the Wee Kim
Wee School of Communications was denied tenure for publicly criticising
Singapore’s system of media control and its ruling party. Although his
department recommended his tenure, it was rejected by government
representatives on the university committee.
It is a lesson on the politics of
criticising the government from within the university. In Singapore’s
case, the government totally funds its universities and provides over 70
per cent tuition subsidy to Singaporean students. So long as government
funding is involved, relative restrictions on academic freedom will
persist, thus cutting back on university autonomy.
Last week, I endorsed the establishment
of Centres of Excellence to be given the mandate of growing their
institutions to world class status just as NTU did, and enjoined some
private universities to join the race. However, given the tradition of
disrespecting goals and deadlines in Nigerian universities, it is
necessary to establish appropriate quality assurance measures. In the
next contribution to this series, I focus on quality control, comparing
the regulatory functions of the National Universities Commission with
broader quality control measures adopted elsewhere.
