Dr. R. Natarajan is former director of IIT-Madras and former chairman of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) In mid-February China’s ministries of education and science and technology jointly issued a notification to reform the academic evaluation system to reduce “excessive reliance on the Science Citation and Social Science Citation indices” as key indicators for “academic promotions, job offers and allocation of research funding”. This radical initiative is backed by the finance ministry, which funds research in national universities. Moving away from international research publications was first announced by President Xi Ping during a national education conference in September 2018. Xi observed that “academic standards in higher education institutions should not be led by Western ideas or standards, and stressed that China should have its own academic standards and norms, not bound by international norms,” reports the London-based University World News (March 4). Dr. Futao Huang, professor of higher education at Hiroshima University, Japan, who has been studying the research culture of young academics in China, says that the shift of emphasis from international publication will translate into huge changes for China’s research evaluation system. He predicts that the status of several Chinese universities in major global university rankings will decline as a result of reduction in SCI publications from Chinese university researchers. That’s because in recent years Chinese scholars are second worldwide for the number of research papers published in international journals, behind only the US. Under the notification, while hard sciences will continue to be subject to international peer reviews and publication in international journals, in soft sciences, such as the humanities and social sciences, profound changes can be expected inasmuch as they have less international linkages and networks and conduct less international collaborative activities. In addition, as Prof. Huang highlights, English is not the language for soft sciences as it is for the hard sciences. It’s well-known that the major global university rankings — QS and Times Higher Education — are heavily influenced by research output and citations in peer reviewed journals published in English. This has a direct bearing on university rankings, and automatically favours Western and AngloAmerican universities which routinely top the QS and THE World University Rankings (WURs) league tables. Higher education institutions in non-English speaking countries of Europe (excluding the UK), Latin America, etc, suffer low rank as a result. However, this doesn’t apply to India where higher education is mostly in English. The plain truth is that research is given too little importance in this country’s 993 universities. Instead of addressing this lacuna, the common complaint against established WURs is that social equity issues such as reservation for the under-privileged and backward classes are not given any importance in them. The Indian response to the QS and THE WURs is the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry. In the annual NIRF, the country’s Top 100 universities, arts, science, commerce colleges, engineering colleges and other professional institutions are evaluated under several parameters including resources, research and stakeholder perceptions which are assigned differing weightage and ranked inter se. About 3,500 institutions have…
