By Osama Ali Maher The Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education in China has published a ranking for the top 500 universities in the world, based on data from the last academic year. The ranking was based on several indicators of academic and research performance, including numbers of Nobel laureates, highly-cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles in science and social science citation indexes, along with academic performance of university faculties. I desperately scanned the best 100 trying to locate an Arab university but to no avail. I decided to go through the rest of the ranking -- from 101 to 500. To my great surprise and disappointment, not a single Arab university was ranked. This ranking raised many questions in my head, the main one simply: Why it is like this? Obviously poverty is not the answer, since no university in the Gulf could be considered poor. The cause must simply be that higher education is not important to us; that universities are not exceptional sites of learning and endeavour but rather a reflection of the general status of our societies, with all their problems. To solve any problem we have to first agree that there is a problem. "Business as usual" cannot be our philosophy. Only then we can begin to try to identify solutions. Education has been moving in the wrong direction. Spending levels have fallen since the mid-1990s and school enrollment levels are not keeping up with rapidly growing populations. Another contributing factor is the "brain drain", or the movement of our best minds to Western countries for financial or other reasons. These issues much be addressed. Education is the most important long-term investment in a globalised world. This week's Soapbox speaker is a researcher at Lund University, Sweden.
