Publish or Perish -- the Right Way to Go?

As usual, the full column is behind the paywall, thus I provide it in entirely in this blog. This issue is also kind of amusing because they put wrong photo for this column. This guy does not look like me at all, does he?

Publish or Perish -- the Right Way to Go?

On January 27, 2012, the National Education Ministry's Directorate General of Higher Education announced that candidates for university degrees -- bachelors, masters and doctorate -- will be required to publish in an academic journal.

This policy seems to be based on evidence that Indonesia lags behind its neighboring countries in publishing scholarly articles. Even though Indonesia has five times as many universities as Malaysia, Malaysia is well ahead in terms of scholarly publications, publishing seven times more than Indonesia.

Worse, in the quality of the journal, Indonesia also lags behind. Only nine Indonesian journals can claim to be internationally accredited. Singapore and Malaysia, on the other hand, have 94 and 45 internationally accredited journals, respectively. Therefore, the government feels it must force all graduates to write, otherwise Indonesia will continue to lag behind in scholastic achiements.

Despite this noble intention, this policy is rife with weaknesses that could threaten the integrity of the higher education itself, instead of improving the quality of Indonesian scholarship .

The first consideration is the funding. Journals are not cheap to publish and they have a limited market. Aside from a few professors and libraries, very few people buy academic journals, especially on topics few care about. Not all universities have well-funded, well-stocked libraries.


Not surprisingly, only 18,854 journals are published in Indonesia, and not all of them are published regularly. In fact, only 121 journals are officially accredited. In contrast, Malaysia with a much smaller population base publishes 55,211 scientific journals while Thailand has 58,931.


Secondly, there are too few good journals in Indonesia to handle the predicted onslaught of articles, as there are literally hundreds of thousands of students graduating each year. While this will increase the number of journals published by universities, this will, at the same time, degrade their quality, as in-house publishers will publish in order to ensure their students graduate, regardless the merit of their articles.


Worse, as the existing journals fail to accomodate the number of articles submitted, the entire process will become corruption-prone, as students resort to bribery or connections to get their manuscripts published.

The third factor is who will determine the suitability of the articles for publication. WWhile there are approximately 270,000 lecturers and professors in Indonesia, with about 24,000 of them holding doctorate degrees, not all of them are involved in publishing.

Some don’t even bother to read their students’ papers, as proven by several scandals in which graduates were found to have plagiarized their thesis or submitted plagiarized articles to be published.

Of course, one reason for the professors' laco fo time with their students is because they themselves may be busy with other occupations. The majority of professors and lecturers, however, cannot help but resort to mulstitasking, considering their low official salaries.

In July 2011, during a Supreme Court hearing on a prospective judge, it was revealed that Doctor Dewi Kania Sugiharti, a law professor at Padjajaran University, one of Indonesia's most respected state universities, received a monthly salary of 6.7 million rupiahs, compelling her to take a second occupation, selling furniture from her house in order to pay for her children’s schooling.

Other professors and lecturers, teaching in smaller universities, fare even worse. In October 2011, Kompas revealed that a researcher in Indonesia earns less than an elementary schoolteacher.

With their time limited by their teaching commitments and their second (or third) jobs, professors are unlikely to have additional time to assess the quality of their students' articles.

Fourthly, by controlling the output, this policy is intended to improve the students' scholarship quality. In reality, this fails to address the elephant in the room, that students don't write because they are not trained to write during their elementary and secondary school periods.

The blame here should be placed on Indonesia’s emphasis on the rote system of learning, preventing students from thinking critically outside the box. They are taught to memorize, instead of to think and analyze. Even literature classes focus more on memorizing the names of dead authors, rather than try to understand and critique their works, to broaden the students’ perspectives.

This policy turns students into passive individuals, obeying instructions for fear of making errors that would jeopardize their grades. Yet, writing is a creative, risk-taking process that can expose the authors' fault publicly.

In short, students do not write because they are lazy, but because they are not trained to do so. Not surprisingly, Indonesians have a hard time trying to get published in reputable journals abroad.

Therefore, this band-aid policy, instead of improving the quality of higher education, will only put more pressure on the already strained system. By putting the cart before the horse, this policy implicitly blames the students, the victims of the flawed education system, for making Indonesia looks bad next to other nations.

The government would do better to improve the quality of the teaching profession and fix the flawed K-12 education system. It will not be fixed overnight, but the long term effect will be much greater and much more beneficial than the current misguided policy.