Academia - Put your finger on the nation's pulse..

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The current obsessions with university ranking results in academia focusing on high impact scientific journal papers. Popular mode of operandi for scholars these days are to isolate your talent so that one can focus on producing the impeccable article that can be accepted in high impact journals. Signs of distress can be seen in other areas of duty, scholars becoming less enthusiastic in teaching, in connecting with people from other areas, in connecting with industry and community.

I remember the days when academia were not burdened with the vision and obsession of higher authority to push for ranking and prestige. We love knowledge and pursuit of it because its valuable in it self, without considering it valuable to our own personal career advancement. It was easy for academia to meet and greet, chit chat over lunch or coffee, without worrying our time spent this way would turn into high impact article or not.

IN any research proposal workshop these days, academia are asked to come up with a research title worth turning into thousand dollars research proposals. What normally would be the outcome, will be topics or projects that focuses in areas of personal interests and pivoted around the expertise of the researchers, rather than around significant and important needs of society at large.

Another mode of discovery would be the 'wahyu' or rvelations that come from the top leaders of the nation. Although we expect these leaders to raise issues of utmost concern to society, more often than not, the interest would be on the popularity impact of the leaders in winning electoral votes. Recently the university's top management received a directive from above to come up with an innovation that would be the highlight of an upcoming event, whereby the face of the leader would be the the adornment for of the newspiece to be written. The innovation itself is a curious technology that certainly would be interesting as news title, but not what currently is important, nor would it succeed given the current ecosystem of that particular industry.

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