61It is not far-fetched to argue that all three key missions of HE in Asia have
become dependent on or caught by a neoliberal outlook, materialism, “bad” prag-
matism and utilitarian, neo-Kantian normative discourses, market-oriented manage-
rialism, and internationalization and the “glory” of global rankings as a goal.
Consider the following special initiatives for selected “elite” universities:
- China’s 211 and 985 projects
- Japan’s Global 30 program
- South Korea’s Brain Korea 21 Program
- Taiwan’s Program for Aiming for Top University (Five Year-Fifty Billion
Program) - Hong Kong’s Areas of Excellence Scheme
They aim to improve the research capacity of selected institutions or research units,
thereby facilitating them to achieve world-class status. Should the future of Asian
knowledge production be developed with neoliberal gimmicks? Jamil Salmi
appraises that there is a crisis and the problems also faced by Asian HE; they are
clearly not sustainable ( 2014 ):
- Raising unreasonable expectations of a rapid rise in the rankings.
- Creating dangerous distortions in resource allocation in favor of a few flagship
institutions to the detriment of the overall tertiary education system when addi-
tional resources are not available. - Undue priority to research and publications in prestigious journals, often at the
expense of excellence and relevance in teaching and learning. - World-class systems are made equivalent to those that can boast the largest num-
ber of highly ranked universities.
A problematization of Asian HE knowledge production is complex and multifac-
eted. They are both structural and agential. Among the structural problems, to men-
tion just a few, we have the so-called all-administrative universities (Ginsberg 2011 )
in Asia, state-sponsored “internalization-aimed” HE programs, institution and state-
initiated elbowing for a higher position in the global rankings, hegemony of
Anglophone academic journals, massive manipulation of peer-reviewing process to
get published in top-ranked journals, and cash incentives for high rank publications
that are becoming a norm across Asian universities.
Problems of agency are not less acute. When Asian universities recruit foreign
students, they are getting global talents; when American universities do so, they do
a favor to the international cause of democracy and development. Agential problems
of Asian HE might be more deeply ingrained in the mind and soul of researchers
and students, hence harder to tackle. Across Asia, academics have a general aver-
sion to teaching, and most of us are after the glory of a successful research fund
hunting. A case in point is Hong Kong. Even those universities with the founding
spirit of assisting secondary education graduates who went to industries’ full-time
jobs for diverse socioeconomic reasons with evening lectures are now fully
embarked in what is a must—a government-funded research university, a true
betrayal in a city that has a pathologically low rate of access to HE and ridiculously
small number of HE institutions.
4 Higher Education Knowledge Production in Postcolonial-Neoliberal Asia