International rankings of universities detail whether research output
provides impacts on society and changes lives, jobs, economies, or
health outcomes. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH
Let us imagine that cooking stands as one of your key passions
in life. You love the experimentation, preparation, and presentation of
all things related to food. As part of your journey, suppose you enter a
food preparation competition on NTV.
If the goal of
the cooking contest entails developing a new approach or taste in Kenyan
cuisine, then which of the following would you attempt in your
competition entries: prepare ugali the same way 30 times or prepare a
dozen unique combinations of ingredients in order to come up with
something phenomenal to charm the judges and perhaps change what
restaurants serve across the country?
The choice seems
obvious to any observer: innovative quality overrules senseless
quantity. However, in Kenya’s higher education landscape, academic
researchers get rewarded for quantity instead of quality. International
rankings of universities detail whether research output provides impacts
on society and changes lives, jobs, economies, or health outcomes. But
here in Kenya, a researcher can get promoted to full professor status
under Commission for Higher Education(CHE) guidelines merely by
researching and publishing things that have already been discovered by
other people by just repeating the experiments, surveys, or interviews.
One
can become a high ranking academic by literally repeating the same
recipe of ugali over and over again with no innovation or usefulness in
one’s research.
In so doing, academia does not have to
create new knowledge. Testing an existing idea in business research in
new industry or culture contexts can often be useful to social science,
but it does not push the boundaries of knowledge. Even worse is
retesting the same cause and effect relationships in the same industries
in the same countries already done over and over again which is like
repeating ugali preparation with no creativity: it fills you up but
provides nothing useful to the broader society.
In
comparison, the British, American, South African, and Singaporean models
of higher education each champion and reward academic research for top
quality, cutting-edge, and life changing results. One innovative
research publication in a top journal can catapult someone up the
professorial ranks. But in Kenya, only quantity matters.
However,
readers of Business Talk know the problems in the research publication
space. The international publishing cartels remain heavily biased
towards the highest ranked universities. Institutions rated at the top
of the Times Higher Education ranking hold a much better chance of
getting into top publications.
Check the top 200 universities found here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking.
So,
the world remains tragically unaware of our Kenyan studies, even the
cutting-edge research. Many good Kenyan researchers still must
co-publish with famous foreign authors in order to get quality
publishing.
We need to combat bias with outstanding
quality. Champion open-source publishing so the whole world can see our
capabilities and contributions. Then reward quality over baseless
quantity and turn Kenya into the world-leading research hub we are
destined to become.
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