258
consultancy, and is merely another competing voice in the transformation agenda.
Within such an environment, the building of a systematic, programmatic knowledge
base in the field of higher education remains unlikely. The sustainability and knowl-
edge building in higher education are thus undermined by constantly shifting inter-
ests and funding patterns.
These structural issues need to be addressed if Malaysian higher education as a
field of study is to make steady progress. More financial support should be given to
worthwhile research topics and long-term research projects. This is not an easy
issue to resolve as the proportion of funding from the government (MoHE) for
higher education as a whole has been decreasing. Therefore, diversification of fund-
ing channels is an increasing necessity. In addition, greater attention needs to be
paid to research infrastructure, especially mechanisms for storing and sharing
research reports and materials emerging from increasingly diverse research topics.
Also, a more systematic, research-informed knowledge base about higher education
needs to be in place to avoid duplication and repetition of research. As suggested by
Teichler ( 2005 ), it would be fruitful to strive for a generally accepted map or themes
of higher education research for this would facilitate the establishment of consistent
information systems and the provision of overviews on the state of knowledge in the
field.
Theory Development and Methodology
Theory development and methodology are two aspects that have been perceived as
the weakest areas in Malaysian higher education inquiry. It is acknowledged that
higher education in Malaysia, as in other countries, is not a discipline, but an inter-
disciplinary, applied field without commonly accepted methodologies, or even gen-
eral agreement on what counts as knowledge (Brennan and Teichler 2008 ; Kehm
2015 ). If the ‘interdisciplinary approach’ is worthwhile maintaining, it requires that
those involved in it revisit their original fields from time to time to draw further
strength within a ‘disciplinary perspective’ to contribute better to the ‘interdisciplin-
ary perspective’. It is important to clarify that even when theoretical elements have
been drawn from different disciplines, they are not contradictory; they come from
different disciplinary territories, but they are neighbouring or adjacent epistemo-
logically (Kezar 2000 ; Neave 2000 ).
Theoretical thinking is needed to reach beyond the specific phenomenon and
form to grasp the nature and the inherent laws of higher education through induc-
tion, deduction, abstraction and conceptualization, achieving the goals of interpreta-
tion and prediction. Empirical research requires a fundamental change of attitude on
the part of Malaysian higher educationists and a major shift of the academic culture
from the logico-deductive tradition to the empirical paradigm (Kaneko 2000 ).
However, it is important to note that studies in higher education have several tiers,
with each assuming a different function—basic research, applied research and
development research (Zhou and Cheng 1997 ). This differentiation of functions is
N. Azman and M. Sirat