The University of Malta, in response to questions posed by this newsroom, believes that certain structural changes, such as autonomy, could help the university attain new heights.
The University believes that it should be reconstituted, through a specific University of Malta Act, as a public-equivalent body which operates autonomously from the public sector, the spokesperson said. “The relationship between Government and the University should be a client/service-provider relationship wherein the Government periodically contracts the University to provide services based on a formula-funding mechanism which reflects the true cost-base of the services being provided. Funding through annual subventions, that is totally detached from expected deliverables, is not conducive to long-term planning, or to attaining better ranking,” a spokesman said.
Introduction of fees?
There are other ideas, dependent on whether the government wishes to be more ‘radical’. One such idea, the spokesperson explained, was to allow the University to charge competitive fees for all its services, and in the case of tuition, instead of funding the University through subventions,“the Government can issue scholarships to students to cover those fees”. This would allow students to have the freedom to choose which university to attend, at the same time allowing the University of Malta to compete with the right level of funding and freedom to develop “without being shackled by the bureaucracy of the public sector,” she added.
Clear title on all properties
The University argues that it should be given clear title on all its properties and should be compensated, at least in kind, for any of its land and property that have been taken up for other public functions. This would allow the University to leverage its assets in order to generate funds which, in turn, would help strengthen its teaching and research infrastructure, the spokesperson added. “Of course, the level of funding provided by Government for research has to increase significantly and in line with EU norms. If universities operating from Malta are to grow in stature internationally, they must have state-of-the-art facilities particularly to support scientific research at the leading edge”.
The University spokesperson was asked whether more autonomy is required for it to work towards improving its rank on international league tables. They were also asked what they believe is needed in order to improve the overall product of the University of Malta.
Rankings
Earlier this week this newsroom highlighted that the University of Malta did not appear on a number of top-400 university world ranking lists.
The spokesperson discussed rankings, explaining that they are heavily influenced by metrics mainly based on matters related to scientific research. “All ‘top-ranking’ universities boast world-class research infrastructures and research budgets which are staggering by local standards”.
The representative adds that despite the significant efforts and investments made to build the research infrastructure of the University of Malta in the past decade, funding required to compete with large research-based universities is ‘massive’. Some universities have larger budgets than those administered by the Maltese government she explained.
Research budgets
Universities situated in countries which have a strong track-record of research funding, and strong industries, which contribute generously to build the research-infrastructures of their universities, are obviously at a great advantage, the spokesperson argued. “For example, post-war, the leading universities in Europe have benefitted from vast sums of national as well as European funding to systematically build their infrastructures over the span of decades. Alas, the University of Malta only started to build its research infrastructure in a significant way relatively recently and the level of funding at its disposal in order to do so is still well off the required mark”.
The spokesperson said that a university with a strong scientific research infrastructure, enough funds to employ one or two Nobel Prize winners amongst its academics, and large groups of research staff churning out a significant steady flow of high-impact scientific publications in leading scholarly journals would rank highly. “Such matters as student satisfaction on the quality of teaching, course completion rates, outreach services to government and civil-society, although included in the criteria, are not given equal importance. For this reason, mainstream opinion in European universities is that these rankings do not valorize those attributes which students or society regard as being most important. Indeed, to this end, the EU is financing a project called U-Multirank, which is a new multi-dimensional approach to ranking of higher education institutions that is user-driven and not built on parameters set by the promoters of standard ranking institutions”.
Competing with big spenders
The representative explains that the University of Malta will never be in a position to compete with international “big spenders” who operate with budgets much larger than the one available to the University of Malta. “This said, if one had to rank universities based on ‘value for money’, undoubtedly the University of Malta would rank amongst the very best in the world”..
The spokesperson states that “one cannot sensibly comment on rankings which are based on arbitrary benchmarks which reflect aspects of a university’s output if one does not do so in the context of the relative input and milieu. So if one aspires to see the University of Malta improve its rankings, one then must make sure that the University has the level of funding and freedom to operate which are compatible with attaining that ranking”.
The university representative said that conditions of work as well as the outlook of the employed academics would also need to be “revised accordingly”.