Deja Vu All Over Again

Malaysia's love-hate affair with international rankings has taken another twist. The official target now is get one university in the top 50 and three in the top 100 in the QS rankings. That basically means that a Malaysian university will have to be the equal of New South Wales, Tsinghua or Warwick.

Last year Universiti Malaya got into the top 500 in the Shanghai ARWU ranking. That is a solid achievement and it might mean more  if Malaysia could get another university there.

This is as part of its efforts to have a local university ranked among the world's top 50 universities by 2020.
Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah said the National Higher Education Strategic Plan also called for at least three local universities to be ranked among the world's top 100 universities.
To achieve this, he told the house that it needed to continuously recruit international students and participate in international education fairs to promote the "Education Malaysia" brand.
He was replying to Senator Mohd Khalid Ahmad who wanted to know why no local universities had been ranked among the world's top 200.
Saifuddin said the ministry was also intensifying promotional activities on the Internet and introducing student mobility programmes. This will allow them to take short-term courses with credits, and have better staff and student exchange programmes with foreign universities.
He said they were also having better scholarship coordination with foreign agencies and other bodies to facilitate the intake of foreign students at local universities.
He said the QS World University Ranking (QS WUR) was the preferred benchmark used to gauge a university.

What have I done?

I was recently in a public library somewhere in Southeast Asia. While browsing around I discovered that access to this blog was blocked because of  "other adult material".

I thought that perhaps someone was upset with university rankings in general, which is entirely understandable, but the THE, QS, ARWU, Webometrics and HEEACT sites were all unblocked.

My best guess is that the filter software interprets anything with "watch" in it as something to do with voyeurism. Or perhaps the post about "does size really matter?" was misunderstood.

Or perhaps it just means that this blog is very mature and sophisticated.

Is this what they meant by diversity?

On December 1st. of last year I commented on proposals that the US News Law School Rankings should include an indicator for diversity.

Such proposals are based on the increasing globalisation of the world economy and the need to understand other cultures. It is obvious that middle class white Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, feminism and Obama must sit in classes with middle class African Americans who support abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, feminism and Obama if they wish to communicate effectively with North Korean bureaucrats, supporters of Boko Haram who will soon control most of Nigeria, the Muslim  Brotherhood or the Haredim who will soon control Israel.

The story of Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School who claims 1/32 Native American ancestry (which is not necessarily the same as Native American identity)  shows the importance of diversity in law education. Were it not for her Cherokee great-great-great grandmother she would obviously be teaching something quite different to her students and so would render them unfit to compete in our diverse multicultural world.

Student Experience Survey

From Times Higher Education, the top ten British universities from the students' viewpoint.

1.   Dundee
2.   Loughborough
3    Sheffield
4.   Oxford
5.   Cambridge
6.   East Anglia
7.   Southampton
8.   Aberystwyth
9.   Glasgow
10.  Leeds