Last year was a bonanza year for all my almae matres in terms of rankings: the University of Glasgow was voted the finest Scottish university; Stanford edged out the University of Pennsylvania to join the Big Four in the annual US college ranking survey. To top it all, the University of Hong Kong outranked Stanford to clinch 18th place in the Times Higher Education Supplement world university ranking survey for last year. Small wonder that our most prestigious local university popped the champagne corks amid outpourings of congratulations.
The Jiao Tong University's 'Academic Rankings of World Universities' for 2007, however, paints a much more sobering picture. It ranked the four leading Hong Kong universities (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University and City University) as tied for 25th place in its 2007 'Asia Pacific' rankings, and tied in the 'world rankings' of the top 500 universities at roughly 200th place. Singapore's National University, by contrast, enjoys much higher rankings in both categories.
The Jiao Tong survey is arguably more objective, as it is based on more quantitative criteria, such as the number of Nobel Prize or Fields Medal winners among faculty and alumni; citations of articles written by faculty; and the number of articles published in prestigious academic journals. The Times survey, in comparison, derives 40 per cent of the weightings from 'peer review', employer feedback (with only a 10 per cent response rate in 2007), faculty/student ratio, citations of articles/dissertations, proportions of international faculty and international students. Given our universities' emphasis on recruitment of international faculty and a conscious effort to promote international diversity, it is not surprising that the University of Hong Kong scored high on the 'internationality' yardsticks.
Different methodologies could indeed be adopted for such surveys and any thinking person could dream up other metrics of excellence. If Silicon Valley-style innovation and entrepreneurship among alumni, breadth and diversity of academic programmes, emphasis on knowledge creation, and research at both undergraduate and graduate levels are adopted as benchmarks, our universities will not fare well.
It is well known that, in all our universities, the most popular programmes are those related to the professions: medicine, law, quantitative finance, global business, actuarial science, accounting, and the like, with declining emphasis on basic arts and sciences.
As a staunch supporter of a broad and deep liberal education, I find nothing more disconcerting than to note the withering of studies of keys areas of western and Chinese civilisations at our top universities. At our best universities, courses on classical civilisation, the ancient and medieval worlds, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and its relevance to the development of modern democracy, are conspicuous by their absence. Increasingly, short-term outlooks and shallow, utilitarian considerations trump the pursuit of academic excellence.
