NOVEMBER 2 — A university does not have to close its doors to diminish as a place of learning. Its intellectual purpose begins to weaken when everything can be questioned except the system by which it is governed.
Lectures continue. Papers appear. Professors are appointed. Graduation ceremonies retain their splendour. Yet the conditions that make scholarship meaningful can deteriorate beneath this institutional continuity.
Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (Pluto Press, 2021) criticises commercialisation, managerial control and the excessive power of performance metrics in universities. His argument invites an uncomfortable question: can an institution keep expanding while eroding the conditions that sustain its intellectual life?
I believe his critique offers a useful lens for examining Malaysian universities. Its wider relevance lies in the relationship between measurement, incentives and academic judgment.
Publication counts tell us how many works have been produced. Citations provide evidence of references to those works. Grant income records financial resources obtained. Each measure has a purpose and a limit.
The difficulty begins when a limited indicator acquires the authority to determine a scholar’s entire worth. Publication volume becomes a verdict on intellectual depth. Grant income becomes a verdict on the importance of a research question. Institutional rank becomes a verdict on the quality of academic life.
These are substantial leaps of judgment.
A scholar can publish extensively without significantly extending knowledge. A well-funded project can coexist with neglected questions of great public importance. Assessing excellence requires attention to substance, method, originality and contribution. Counting cannot discharge that responsibility for us.
When a university delegates academic judgment to numerical indicators, it diminishes its own intellectual responsibility.
The incentives then shape the work. If promotion, recognition and resources depend too heavily on outputs that can be counted quickly, academics have reasons to favour activities that meet those demands.
Research questions may be selected for their likelihood of publication. Investigations may be fitted to appraisal cycles. Community engagement may need to be translated into uploadable evidence before its value becomes institutionally visible.
Under such conditions, exhortations to be original become contradictory. Originality requires time to attempt something uncertain, encounter difficulty and reconsider an assumption. A system that penalises delay without examining its causes risks discouraging the work most capable of producing a breakthrough.
Does our system reward intellectual exploration, or proficiency in identifying the safest route to a target?
Malaysia’s Higher Education Plan 2026 to 2035 provides a particularly significant reference point. It identifies excessive emphasis on quantity-based rather than outcome-based performance indicators as a factor undermining high-impact research and innovation initiatives. The concern is therefore recognised within the country’s own policy framework. Institutional practices now need to be examined against that diagnosis.
Reporting also has a cost. Every form, evidence request and performance return consumes somebody’s time. Academic time is finite. Time spent documenting an achievement reduces the time available to produce the next one.
Each additional reporting requirement should therefore justify its benefits against its demands. How many hours does it require? Does it duplicate information already held? Who uses the information? Which decisions improve because of it?
If these questions cannot be answered convincingly, the requirement deserves scrutiny. Universities that demand evidence from their academics should apply comparable scrutiny to the effectiveness of their own evidence demands.
Another difficulty concerns the diversity of scholarship. A teacher who develops a student’s intellectual maturity contributes differently from a scientist who makes a laboratory discovery. Historical scholarship, legal analysis and philosophical inquiry may demonstrate their significance over a much longer period.
Forcing these contributions into a narrow definition of success risks penalising forms of scholarship that a university should preserve.
Questions of local public importance may also lose ground if their principal value is assessed through their marketability within international publishing. Who should determine our intellectual priorities: public needs, scholarly judgment or the market for academic recognition?
Academic freedom poses an equally searching test. As a law educator, I teach students to examine the exercise of power, challenge reasons and test the validity of decisions. University governance should exemplify those habits.
An academic who offers evidence-based criticism is exercising an intellectual responsibility. Mature leadership should be willing to defend its decisions through reasons open to examination. If questioning becomes difficult as soon as administrative interests are involved, what lesson does the institution teach its students?
Compliance may facilitate administration. Academic authority also requires the willingness to hear an argument that disturbs institutional comfort.
A critique of measurement thus calls for deeper accountability. Academics must answer for the quality of their work. University leaders must answer for the systems that determine how that work is undertaken and valued.
Practical reform should start there. Institutions should examine the time consumed by reporting, recognise different forms of scholarly contribution and require substantive peer judgment alongside indicators. Leaders should protect evidence-based disagreement and assess research through its quality and public contribution as well as its visibility.
Malaysia needs universities capable of advancing knowledge, educating judgment and scrutinising power through reasoned argument. Those responsibilities require freedom, time, trust and institutional wisdom.
Fleming’s warning matters because intellectual decline can coexist with increasingly impressive performance reports.
What does international recognition ultimately mean if the scholars within a university are losing the freedom to judge what is truly worth doing?
* By Associate Professor Dr Shahrul Mizan Ismail, Faculty of Law, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, email: [email protected]
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
