259not only useful but also necessary in the Malaysian context. The relative indepen-
dence of scholarly activities in higher education from policies, practice and admin-
istrative organizations should always be maintained.
There is also a need to promote empirical research, especially research with the-
oretical underpinnings. Theory building means revealing and clarifying the research
issues, the epistemological origins of the concepts discussed and their appearances
and applications (Tight 2004 ). The way academics teach in higher education pro-
grammes will be driven primarily by their beliefs or, even more importantly, by the
commonly agreed consensus within an academic discipline about what constitutes
valid knowledge in the subject area (Tight 2013 , 2014 , 2015 ). But, we argue that
there are very few Malaysian scholars who have been genuinely preoccupied with
the issues. The ‘patting-on-the head’ mode of doing scholarship, and the overt polit-
ical influence and interference, has constrained the field’s progress. The state of the
art of higher education research in other countries remains largely unfamiliar to
Malaysian higher education researchers. The absence of methodological and theo-
retical paradigms at the field/disciplinary level and the vital influence of ideology
and politics on methodology all suggest that there is still a long way to go towards
building the scientific mechanism into the Malaysian higher education inquiry.
Critical Mass of Scholars
It is acknowledged, however, that strengthening and building the field of higher
education requires far more than research funding (Jones 2012 ). In order for the
field to flourish, it needs adequately trained researchers who can advance higher
education as a field of study and also bring about greater coordination in knowledge
production, transfer and dissemination. The researchers must also be able to facili-
tate better links/interactions with international higher education researchers and
domestic policymakers, institutional leaders, policymakers and other HE stakehold-
ers. Moving the field forward requires a larger number of core faculty working
within higher education programmes and a higher capacity in research.
The situation regarding the number of scholars dedicated to educational research
is unclear. It is difficult to get the specific numbers of those who work in higher
education research except those who have been appointed by IPPTN as research
associates. Even then, there is no doubt that the scholars are academics with multi-
disciplinary backgrounds, and this characteristic is applicable to the epistemic com-
munity. There are also a growing number of people who are primarily in charge of
administrative and service functions in higher education institutions, but are inter-
ested in conducting research in higher education, and have actually succeeded.
While this is considered a healthy development in increasing capacity, we caution
that while the occasional researcher-practitioners or partial researchers contribute to
the application of existing concepts on information gathering in a pragmatic man-
ner, little is relevant to an improvement of the theory and concept of higher educa-
tion research. The limited number of core professors, and the fact that most of the
14 Higher Education as a Field of Study in Malaysia: Towards an Epistemic...