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.

Discarded Sandals, Nascent Democracy

The reason why I first deal with the Arab Spring and put "Syria" in the mix was because I promised a reader that I'd address the killings in Syria in my next article.

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Discarded Sandals, Nascent Democracy
Yohanes Sulaiman | January 06, 2012

Aktivis perlindungan anak Seto Mulyadi (tengah) dalam acara penggalangan sandal jepit di kantor Komisi Perlindungan Anak Indonesia (KPAI) Jakarta, Selasa (3/1). FOTO: INDRA HARDI/RM

This week marks the first anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation sparked the Arab Spring and led to the downfall of three Middle East dictators, with two more seemingly on their way out.

Yet the long-term effects of the Arab Spring remain unclear due to the lack of strong legal systems in the region. Democracy and minority rights are in a precarious condition in Egypt, for example, thanks in part to the Egyptian military, which uses kangaroo trials and raids to pressure the opposition.

In Syria, counterrevolution attacks by the ruling regime have left more than 6,000 people dead, tens of thousands wounded and many more imprisoned under dubious accusations. In Bahrain, the Shiites continue to criticize the ruling house for its Saudi-backed repressive policies and a rigged judicial system, which has unfairly sentenced many people to long prison sentences.

It is not a pretty picture. Like Georges Danton, a major figure of the French Revolution, said in his own kangaroo trial, “The revolution is like Saturn, devouring all of its children.”

Many analysts have made a strong case that Middle Eastern countries would do well to learn from Indonesia’s successful transition to democracy. Indonesia does have many lessons to teach, such as the successful withdrawal of the military from the political arena and a relatively stable democracy.

Yet Indonesia has also had its own share of judicial troubles that should serve as a warning, not a guide.

As an example, consider the recent “sandal trial” in Central Sulawesi, where a 17-year-old boy was put in the dock for allegedly stealing a pair of sandals from a police officer.

The trial is fascinating for three reasons, the first being that it was even held at all. The supposedly stolen sandals did not fit the accuser’s feet and were the wrong brand, while the police officer said he knew they belonged to him because he had a “spiritual connection” with them. Given these facts, it seems likely that the prosecutor did not examine the details of the case before sending it to court. In other countries, this kind of conduct would trigger an investigation into the prosecutors’ professional conduct and the police officer’s own mental sanity.

In essence, the sandal case reveals the lack of legal depth of Indonesia’s supposed upholders of law. Had this happened in the United States, the district attorney would have refused to take the case, while the police’s legal affairs team would have told the officer he had no case and would likely face a costly public relations nightmare.

The second reason this trial is interesting is because it shows how mob rule is still present in Indonesia. It is very doubtful that the teenager would have been set free had there not been such a public outrage. As we have seen in other high-profile trials — notably, the killing of Ahmadiyah members in Cikeusik, West Java, and the “Ariel Peterporn” scandal — sentences are often determined not by the severity of the misconduct, but the noise of spectators during the trial, or, in many corruption cases, by the power and connections of the defendants.

Because the judicial system lacks independence and integrity, it is no wonder that many trials look like an audition for “Indonesian Idol,” with interested parties bringing along as many supporters as they can and brawls occasionally erupting outside courthouses. Nobody is convinced of the judicial independence of the court systems in Indonesia, and thus people attribute any negative outcomes to the justices being bribed by the winning parties, regardless of a case’s merit.

The third reason the sandal trial was fascinating is because it shows how the idea of shame has not taken root in the bureaucracy. The National Police, facing a public relations disaster, decided to up the ante. Rather than acknowledging the public’s outrage, which was manifested in the donations of sandals, it declared its intention without shame to donate the sandals to the needy. Ironically, many needy people were among those who donated the sandals in the first place.

The Attorney General’s Office, rather than admitting that the trial was stupid, asked the public to “withhold judgment” and focus on the fact that the “five-year sentence” was still a “possibility.” The trial was all a bad show, but the show had to go on because the actors could not admit it was so bad.

At the same time, instead of dismissing the charge, the judges found the defendant guilty but “decided to be lenient,” surrendering to public pressure by releasing him to his parents’ custody. None were willing to admit that the trial had been a waste of time.

Such institutional pride, fueled by egos the size of battleships, does not bode well for the long-term health of the country’s democracy. With such distrust in the legal system, people believe they have to go to the street to demand justice, turning democracy into anarchy.

The remaining Middle Eastern despots are aware of this fear, namely that they are the last bastions of stability in countries where the judicial system is a mess, and it keeps them from being overthrown by a fed-up population.

For the sake of democracy, Indonesia should also take heed. In exposing a rotten system, a pair of sandals could be the straw that breaks the back of a young democracy.