Letters | Singapore risks seeing worthy local research sidelined in hurry to climb up global university rankings
- The publicly funded Presidential Young Professor scheme, with its high salaries and big research grants, exacts a large opportunity cost for non-PYP faculty
It exacts a large opportunity cost in reduced resources for non-PYP faculty (the money must come from somewhere), exacerbates inequities and divisions among faculty of different ranks (PYP, non-PYP tenure-track, educator), and generates uncertainty and insecurity over faculty hiring and promotion standards.
All of these diminish morale and impede faculty recruitment and retention, undermining collaborative research and undergraduate teaching.
Prof Quah does not dispute that the recent roll-out of non-STEM PYP has been accompanied by administration rejection of job candidates selected by departments for tenure-track faculty positions, and of departments’ and external reviewers’ recommendations to tenure existing faculty, who previously would have been accepted.
Overseas Graduate Scholarship and Overseas Postdoctoral Fellowship recipients have told us that some returnees have been unexpectedly placed on the educator track, which is “a career dead-end for Singaporean PhDs”, given the “higher teaching load and little research support”.