DIS-ENDANGERING RESEARCH AND KNOWLEDGE CREATION INERTIA AMIDST CONSTRAINTS IN A TEACHING UNIVERSITY: THE EXPERIENCE OF UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA

The general thrust of Third world universities in general and in Malaysia in particular, are often geared toward producing human capital to support and sustain national development goals. This is especially true in countries where, ever since their independence, the required skills are still inadequate particularly in science and technology, medicine and, to a lesser extent, social sciences. Hence the general focus would be to emphasise on teaching of the undergraduate programmes, at the expense of postgraduate supervision and scholarly research. This anomaly is not necessarily due to financial constraints (as in the case of Malaysia, the income from tuition fees do not often exceed 10 percent of total revenue of the universities) but on the need to expand human capacity for national development. Given this trend and difficulties, it is, however, still possible to promote and inculcate research culture within the university and it is still possible to avoid this “endangered species ” syndrome. Based on the experience of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), research can be given equal impetus and weightage as teaching, and research culture can be assimilated in many dimensions of academic endeavour, including key performance indicators, institutional goals, external relations and promotion exercises. Since 2000, USM was able to escalate and forge R&D culture into its day-to-day activities through