N Pandor: Academy of Science of South Africa Annual Awards

26 November 2007

"Excellence in science"

Prof Robin Crewe, President, Academy of Science of South Africa
Members of the council of the academy
Distinguished awardees to be
Guests

It gives me great pleasure to be here tonight. It gives me particular
pleasure to have been asked to present the awards tonight. I want to talk about
three things; women in science, university rankings, and accredited
publications, and you may well ask whether there is a connection between all
three. The academy plays an important role in the world of South African
science. The existence of an apex organisation for scientific scholarship has
immense value.

I have long believed in the importance of acknowledging excellence, because
among many other reasons it provides an important target for beginners to aim
at. It offers novice scientists the desire to aspire to greatness. A national
academy helps to bring out the best in all participants in academic
scholarship. It also has a special role to play in the promotion of women
scientists. There is a gender balance in favour of women students in higher
education; but there is not a gender balance in favour of women in postgraduate
research.

So we need interventions in favour of developing women in research.

Some practical interventions are already in place: the provision of
equipment grants; special conference funding; workshops in publication and
writing skills; postgraduate grants and research fellowships for women, special
concessions for study leave (including lecturing replacements), as well as
active institutional communication about research opportunities. Many of these
initiatives are aimed, rightly so, at young researchers in general, but we have
to make certain that there is a clear bias towards women in these
programmes.

The National Advisory Council on Innovation has a committee focusing on
women in Science, Engineering and Technology; and the National Research
Foundation (NRF) runs Women in Research Programme. However, much more can be
done only one in three published scientists is a woman, and she is younger and
less qualified than her male colleagues. The NRF is playing a role in
encouraging research potential at undergraduate level, by offering small grants
to undergraduates who have research potential and are in their third or fourth
year of study, to learn about research by providing research assistance to
experienced academics in their field.

Does the academy have any plans to improve the position of women in science?
Without incentives that support and recognise women in research, significant
change is unlikely to take place. This brings me to the issue of ranking
universities. We have all been pleased to hear that the University of Cape Town
(UCT) has made it into the Times Higher Education Supplement's list of top
universities, slotting in at number 200 in the world. Last year we did not care
about rankings, none of our universities were ranked at all. In fact, I
answered a question in Parliament in which I said as much, saying that rankings
all depended on what criteria were used to assess universities.

There are biases in rankings. It is hard to disagree with this anonymous
comment (no 776528) one of many that can be found attached to the publication
of the story on the rankings in the Guardian:
Among professionals, it is no secret that the Times Higher Education Supplement
(THES) rankings are simply not credible. At a conference on university rankings
in Holland earlier this year, the study was thrashed by exposing its enormous
methodological inadequacies. The mere assumption that universities as a whole
can be ranked (and therefore that within each of them all faculties are equal)
is faulty. Not to mention the inherent bias in favour of English speaking
universities or against smaller, specialised higher education (HE)
institutions.

And the authors are well aware of this: in one of the previous editions,
halfway down the accompanying article there was this startling sentence: "There
is no sign that a high ranking university in our table is better than one more
lowly ranked". Indeed. It is hard to assess universities as a whole and there
is a bias towards English speaking universities, not surprisingly. Only last
month there was immense opposition at the United Nations Educational, Cultural
and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO) bi-annual conference in an attempt to fund
a study into what perhaps for translation reasons the difference between
"evaluation" and "ranking" appeared to be an international ranking of
universities.

Yet when we do well, we are pleased. And we do well in many international
studies of competitiveness. So why not the ranking of universities? Resistance
to ranking is based on fears that many institutions suffer from a range of
legacy disadvantages. Our task is to assist the sector to develop to a higher
level of quality so that it stops being afraid of external scrutiny. We need to
be unashamed in our pursuit of excellence. The academy has played a role in
supporting universities improve their research output.

I think in particular of the academy's report on research publishing.
Implementation of the reforms recommended in the report requires cooperation
between a number of role players, the Department of Education; the Department
of Science and Technology; the Council on Higher Education and the Higher
Education Quality Committee; the NRF and other public research funding bodies;
Higher Education South Africa and its member institutions; the research
councils; and many others. Even without these reforms, our scientific
publication output continues to grow.

The independent panel of the Research Output Evaluation Team for books and
proceedings published in 2006 found some encouraging signs of research output
improvement. Universities (97%) continue to produce the majority of
publications output and universities of technology (3%). The institutions that
produce most publications continue to be the same as in previous years; the
universities of Pretoria, KwaZulu-Natal, Stellenbosch, Cape Town and
Witwatersrand, which produced 63% of overall output units between 2004 and
2006. While there was an increase in publication over the past three years, the
level of productivity per academic staff member is still below benchmarks
overall.

Moreover, the majority of publication units are allocated for research
outputs published in journals and not books. The vexed question of what to do
about books; remains whether we do not reward the publication of books, and
whether we need to reward the publication of books and so on. A lot remains to
be done in this regard and the encouragement of local publication is one way to
improve the international ranking of our universities.

I warmly congratulate all who will receive awards this evening; your
achievements are an example to all of us. It is a pleasure to see that the
majority of the awardees are young, with most of their research careers still
lying open before them.

I thank you all, and wish the Academy of Science of South Africa great
success in all its endeavours.

Issued by: Department of Education
26 November 2007
Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za/)