Mohsen Zahran* casts a troubled eye over the future of the academy Since the Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Institute of Higher Education published its annual report on the world's top 500 universities, many of us have been gripped by despair. Cairo University excepted, not a single Arab institution of higher learning made it onto the list. In all of Africa, only Egypt and South Africa appeared at all. According to the study, 433 of the world's top universities are in Western Europe, North America and Japan, 350 in the G-8 countries. The message is that economic development is inextricably linked to academic excellence. The opposite holds equally true. Backward nations typically suffer from low scientific as well as social and humanitarian standards; scholars don't seem to prosper in the developing world. As it stands, scientific achievement is exclusive to industrialised nations. A country of over a billion people, China is now growing at 12 percent, yet the report reveals it has only nine of the world's top 500 universities. Likewise Taiwan and Hong Kong, with 10 institutions between them; though these two countries' standard of living is much higher than China's. India, with nearly a billion people, does not boast more than two universities. India is well known for its scholarships; but together with Russia -- also rated at two universities -- much of its research is not published in international periodicals, rendering it irrelevant. When all is said and done, the economic factor is the most decisive. At $21 trillion, NAFTA's gross national product is nearly equal to that of the European countries combined; North America has 290 institutions on the list, 85 more than Europe, including Eastern Europe, and more than half of the world's. Egypt's appearance on the list would have been good news if not for one small detail. In an Al-Ahram interview published on 4 September 2006, the university president concedes that, if not for three graduates who went on to receive the Nobel Prize -- Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammad El-Baradei and Yasser Arafat -- the institution would never have made it. That the Nobel Prize is among the criteria was just a stroke of luck. Of the Nobel laureates in question, indeed -- one novelist and two politicians -- not one received the prize in recognition of academic achievement. Compared to 55 universities from the northern Mediterranean (Greece, Italy, France, and Spain) -- four from South Africa and five from Latin America -- there were none at all from the southern Mediterranean, except for Cairo University. Crisis? It would seem so. We are always complaining about Western dominance, but the proverb says, "He who works with his axe thinks with his head." If we want to break the West's hegemony, we need to make some academic headway. Of course, academic listings are not the only sign of progress; and China's study gives too much weight to international awards and research published in English. Humanities figure prominently, for example, but in the Arab world the vast majority of humanities research is never published in English. Criteria relating to size and proportionate academic distinction further diminish Arab chances. All of which should not detract from the message that it is time we started fixing our educational system. According to former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, progress in Malaysia started with an overhaul of education. Even countries that are far ahead of us -- the US, the UK, France and Russia, for example -- are continually reassessing their academic work. In this context a few points come to mind. An overhaul of the pre-college schooling is required, and admissions should be governed by department-specific exams, not general secondary school results. Educators, especially university professors, should be granted lucrative wages in return for working full time in a specific institution -- we must put an end to the system whereby their time is divided among several institutions, with no time set aside for research. Private universities that do not have adequate material and human resources should not be built, let alone allowed to rob the state-run universities of their faculty. Bylaws for faculty promotion, too, must be revised -- putting an end to nepotism, plagiarism and substandard research. The institutions must be provided with sufficient funding for reference material, laboratories and other facilities. This is not an exhaustive list, but with these ends in view, it will at least be possible to reconsider the educational system as part of the country's infrastructure, which the recent spate of train crashes shows is in dire need of reform. Schools and hospitals are being privatised, presumably to save money, but the result is that the country will be losing out in the long run. Perhaps it is time to pay attention not to how much we are spending, but to how we spend it. * The writer is professor of planning at Alexandria University
