New campuses are not the answer to Indonesia’s quality problem
During one of his addresses last year, Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto expressed the hope that Indonesia’s flagship higher education institution, the University of Indonesia, would break into the world’s top 100 higher education institutions. He wasn’t specific about the timescale but presumably he meant during his tenure. For an institution currently languishing in the 801-1,000 bracket in Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings, that would be extraordinary progress.
The president’s aspiration to build world-class academic excellence – underscored by his invitation to world-renowned UK institutions to explore institutional partnerships in Indonesia – is necessary for a nation aiming to escape the middle-income trap. Nevertheless, the mismatch between aspiration and execution cannot be bridged by rhetoric alone.
Nor is this the only example of that mismatch. On 22 July, the president proposed to establish a brand-new institution, known as the University of the Republic of Indonesia (Universitas Republik Indonesia, or URI), charged with educating the country’s future leaders via a network of 10 new campuses across the country. He did not mention a specific ranking target but presumably his ambition for the new institution – which already has a governor (rector) and vice-governor – is as lofty as it is for the University of Indonesia.
A central flaw in the URI initiative, however, is the apparent assumption that world-class academic status can be purchased rapidly through physical real estate and imported talent. Higher education history proves that new top-tier research universities require at least a decade merely to achieve baseline organisational maturity and international reputational standing.
Want to write for THE? Click for more information
For instance, Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, founded in 2010 with lavish state funding, is still only in the 401–500 bracket in THE’s rankings. As a postgraduate-only institution, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), founded a year earlier in 2009, doesn’t qualify for most world rankings but it is ranked an impressive 9th in the Leiden Rankings for the proportion of its papers in the top 10 for their field – just above the University of Cambridge. Yet the Saudi government gave the institution a virtually unlimited budget, alongside the practical support necessary to make world-class status a reality.
In Indonesia’s case, history suggests that undertaking a new mega-project would inevitably involve redirecting massive public resources away from existing, proven higher education institutions, further undermining an already underfunded system. Nor is there any guarantee that successive administrations, which are elected on a five-year cycle, would maintain the same level of commitment, even if the initiative were enshrined in law.
Also concerning are the early indications that the URI’s founding leadership structure may lean heavily on political appointments, such as regional governors and figures from the military. The institution’s governor, for instance, is not an internally renowned academic leader, as at KAUST or Nazarbayev, but a military general. Globally, there is no precedent for a world-class research university thriving under a state-directed, securitised governance model. True academic excellence requires an environment of intellectual freedom, meritocratic governance and institutional autonomy, not top-down administrative decree.
Importing foreign professors to staff these new campuses could introduce further imbalances into Indonesia’s academic ecosystem. Unless they are integrated into domestic research frameworks on terms of equal partnership, their presence will yield minimal knowledge transfer and could marginalise domestic scholars if they are spared the onerous administrative burdens and inadequate financial compensation from which domestic academics suffer. Salary scales and administrative duties should be common to all.
As things stand, the majority of Indonesian university lecturers and schoolteachers earn baseline salaries that fail to reflect their role as catalysts for national development. This chronic underinvestment in human capital is a much bigger challenge facing Indonesian higher education than a shortage of physical campus buildings. In that sense, spending 100 trillions rupiahs (£4 billion) or more to construct and operationalise 10 new campuses would be a complete misuse of a higher education budget that ought to be allocated according to strict principles of efficiency, effectiveness and academic rationale.
Want to write for THE? Click for more information
The application of such principles would also see more money spent on specialised research infrastructure. In my area of biomedicine, that would be in areas such as genomics, stem cells, bioengineering, bioinformatics. It would also involve more support for the very important hospitals that universities themselves have established and which have supplanted the older, well-equipped, ministry-run hospitals for teaching purposes. These hospitals form part of the academic health system (AHS), which also encompasses provincial, city, district and private hospitals, as partners in teaching and research.
I call on the government, then, to halt the roll-out of the URI and conduct an independent academic review of the proposal, involving the Audit Board of Indonesia (BPK), public policy experts and a National Higher Education Consortium consisting not only of university rectors but also other stakeholders, including experts in higher education, law and economics. I believe this review would illustrate the wisdom of redirecting the proposed budget for the URI – if there really is one, over and above current spending on higher education – into the general University Endowment Fund (DAPT). This would allow universities to raise baseline lecturer compensation, as well as upgrade high-end research laboratories, university hospitals and the AHS.
The government should also strengthen double-degree programmes and joint research initiatives between Indonesia’s premier universities and global top-10 institutions, built on equal collaboration and reciprocal exchange. And it should ensure that Indonesian higher education is open, inclusive and meritocratic, cultivating leadership from all segments of society.
By empowering existing centres of academic excellence, Indonesia can honour the president’s vision of making its universities world class – not through costly short cuts, but through sustainable, system-wide structures.
Theddeus O.H. Prasetyono is a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Indonesia.