253‘a pond-like quality’ which comprises a diverse body of interdisciplinary scholarship
encompassing a broad territory, but with little depth in treatment.
In reality, there is no real planning for higher educational research at the national
level. Nationally, educational research is planned and coordinated by the Institution
of Higher Education Excellence Planning Division, under the Department of Higher
Education, MoHE (Bahagian Perancangan Kecemerlangan Institusi—BPKI) which
vets proposals and provides funding for higher education policy research. Priority is
given to projects that have strategic importance for national higher education devel-
opment with potentially extended social and political benefits. The selection of pro-
posals depends largely on the understanding of the evaluation panel committee of
the day with little input from higher education scholars. In many instances, the
minister’s office and the top administration of the ministry have some control over
what projects are legitimate and worthwhile funding.
Content analysis of the four-year research projects (2011–2014) approved by
BPKI indicates that the topics approved for funding are dominated by issues relating
to governance reforms, transition in national higher education systems and graduate
employability, all of which account for slightly more than 50 per cent (of 104 proj-
ects). Other topics approved include audit and quality measures, access and equity,
and issues around globalization and regionalization (internationalization and stu-
dent mobility). However, the chief weakness in the studies is the glaring lack of
meta-analysis. The 104 studies are contextualized at the national or subnational
level, such as those concerning teaching systems, and the labour market. Research
projects of international scope comparing Malaysia with several countries are
hardly funded. Similarly, studies on the philosophy of higher education (i.e. society/
state-centred philosophy) and studies on the relationship between higher education,
economic and social developments do not get any aid from the top-down policy
research fund. This means that comparative, historical and philosophically dialecti-
cal studies in higher education do not have a place in the policy research agenda. It
is also quite difficult to get a research project in this field financed by the Fundamental
Research Grant Scheme (a national research public fund scheme under MoHE) as
evaluators do not see higher education as a fundamental topic. It is likely that the
infrastructure of higher education research will be further weakened under the
increasingly tightened government budget.
Evidently, the majority of the research topics are concerned with practical issues
in higher education, which suggests that higher education research in Malaysia is,
for the most part, an applied area of study. Frequently, theoretical paradigms are
either inadequate or absent. Instead, these paradigms seem to be replaced by the
government’s policy statements. This has been criticized or even condemned as the
‘politicization’ of higher education research (Anderson and Johnson 1998 ; Sawyer
1996 ; Tight 2004 ). It appears that most government-funded Malaysian higher edu-
cation studies result in research reports on practical issues that tend to be loosely
structured and unsystematically analysed, with few clear strategic policy conclu-
sions. It could be said then that studies in higher education in Malaysia tend to treat
a given topic from theory to practice, which may appear to be more systematic, but
has limited and superficial scholarly appeal. As argued by Conrad ( 1988 ) and
14 Higher Education as a Field of Study in Malaysia: Towards an Epistemic...