Am I the only one finding the States Times’ sentimental tribute/farewell articles on Suharto rather distasteful? The guy was hardly a saint, after all. Perhaps they are merely preparing the ground for the inevitable death of our own Dear Leader? Which would explain why there have been so many editorials harping on the affinity between our Dear Leader, Mahathir, and “Pak Harto”. Can’t start drawing parallels too early, can we?

I was recently at a talk organised by A*Star to promote its AGA scholarships with partner universities. They had gotten professors from the overseas partner universities to come down and interact with potential PhD students. Each university gave a talk selling itself to the audience.

NTU’s talk was plain embarrassing. The speaker, a certain Professor Lye, had bad English grammar and pronounciation throughout. But let us not fault him for that. Perhaps NTU cannot be blamed for having a dearth of senior representatives who can communicate well in English. The truly embarrassing aspect of NTU’s talk was that they were utterly incompetent at hiding or glossing over the fact that taking a scholarship with them is a lousy proposition, because their research is generally lousy and good students could probably go to better universities than them.

They did attempt to put a gloss on things, with undisguisedly pompous talk. Lye began by saying that he was “honoured to be in a room with so many potential leaders”. Sucking up to the audience, but anyone who has sat through enough talks by civil servants can see through the emptiness of those words. Then he went on to proclaim that NTU is not aspiring to be any ordinary university. Instead, they think of themselves as the “Next Technological Utopia”. The talk proceeded splattered with feel-good big words that one tends to hear in self-help on entrepreneurship classes: “spin-off”, “global picture”, “ample leverage”, etc.

Next came the attempt to fluff up their research statistics. The latest figure for number of citations per paper (I think it was for 2003 or so) was 2.52. Chew on that. The average paper by an NTU academic has been cited only less than 3 times. That means a substantial number have only one or zero citations. However, this statistic was presented as a sign of NTU’s rise as the Next Technological Utopia, for in 1997 they had only 1.06 citations per paper. In other words, in 1997 about half of the papers produced by NTU had no citations whatsoever.

Now, you might jump on me for being unfair on someone who was trying the best he can. But I don’t think he was. I think he could have done much better. And the reason for that is that the talk right before NTU’s was NUS’s, and they did much better. NUS is not well known for its research strengths. So they did not even attempt to put forward an optimistic interpretation of their research strengths, which would surely pale in comparison to those of UIUC, CMU, Imperial, and the other overseas partner universities. Instead, they emphasised the many opportunities their graduate students would have to participate in exchange programmes with good overseas universities, the special organisation of their graduate programme which would (they claimed) facilitate interdisciplinary research, student-student interaction, diverse experiences, flexibility, yada yada. They also did not attempt to give themselves a corny, obviously pretentious new nickname. And, perhaps most importantly, they did not shoot themselves in the foot during the Q&A session (see below for how NTU did).

NTU’s blatant flashing of their frankly awful research statistics appeared to stick in people’s minds, for there were audible sniggers and whispers when the University of Dundee gave their talk and displayed their research statistics. In biology and biochemistry, Dundee had 27.7 citation per paper on average. In molecular genetics, they had 34.2 citations per paper on average. Now that’s when you can unashamedly show people your research statistics. Not when all you can say is “ooh, some of us have published in Science! And Physical Review A! Look!”

But I haven’t gotten to the most embarrassing part of NTU’s appearance that day. In the Q&A session, an NTU student asked NUS/NTU why one should take up their graduate scholarships when one has the option of going overseas. First, there was a great reply from a foreign professor-VIP, whose identity I still have not isolated, who practically rushed up to the microphone and said, “If you get into a top ten university and get funding from them, just GO!” Oh dear. Damage control time. Most of the defenders made satisfactory glosses, but NTU practically slapped themselves in the face with a huge cream pie. Lye went up to the microphone and started spewing phrases like “I will challenge you”, “the world has also come into Singapore”, “there are 40-over countries down here” (referring to NTU’s mix of nationalities), and ended with this gem: “If you’re an extrovert introvert and you go overseas, you’ll just go to Chinatown!”

Gobsmacking. Quite apart from the fact that it’s a very, very poor reason for choosing to stay in Singapore rather than going overseas (studying overseas is much, much more than immersing yourself in the predominant culture of your host nation), it also insults overseas Singaporeans, particularly overseas Singaporeans who are introverts. Apparently you can have a PhD and still make the ridiculous mistake of confusing introversion with cultural insularity/xenophobia.

Incidentally, if you click through the links for each university’s programme on the AGA website, you’ll notice that A*Star demands that you have either first-class honours or, if you have second-class honours, they will also consider your ‘A’ Level results. This is absurd. We are talking about determining if someone is fit to be a PhD-level scientist and beyond, after the candidate in question has had ample time in her undergraduate years to show her mettle, and what do we look at? Her high school results! Do graduate schools care about your high school results when you apply to their graduate programs? Clearly we have some especially enlightened minds leading the nation’s biggest scientific venture.

Looks like we can’t rely on the States Times to give correct information for even a simple MRT route. In their print edition today, they published an example[pdf] of an onerous route from someone’s home in Ang Mo Kio to her former workplace Pasir Panjang. Part of the route has her taking the MRT westwards from Ang Mo Kio towards Jurong East, then changing trains there to go eastwards to Buona Vista station! Now anyone who has ever taken a train from the eastern half of the North-South line towards the western half of the East-West line knows that the trip across the northern half of the island is very long. It is unfathomable that anyone who lives in Ang Mo Kio would choose to take the train towards Jurong East rather than towards City Hall/Raffles Place. A quick check on streetdirectory.com shows that by this shorter route, it takes only 34 minutes to get from Ang Mo Kio station to Buona Vista station. Compare with the ST’s highlighted route, which takes 52 minutes in total.

Now someone is going to point out that the ST did indeed suggest taking the shorter route if the southbound train arrives first at Ang Mo Kio. But why would anyone take the longer route even if the northbound train arrives first? We often have to wait pretty long for trains to arrive, but the difference can’t be as large as 18 minutes, which is the difference in travel time between the short route and the long route. During peak hours the time between trains is negligible and waiting for the next train is almost painless.

OK, it may well be true that the person profiled in this case, Ms Conceicao, did indeed take the long route on occasion, but her choice to do so despite the obvious disadvantages should not lead the newspaper to convey the longer route as a typical route. If someone chooses to ride his daily train to its endpoint and then disembark, get on the train going back the way he came, and alight at his non-endpoint stop, would I report his little habit in an article on the vagaries of public transport? When we want to demonstrate how inefficient and troublesome taking public transport is, shouldn’t we portray the most efficient (cost- and time-wise) route for our chosen starting point and destination, instead of deliberately adding to the inefficiency?

This is not the only ridiculous spin the ST is putting on Ms Conceicao’s commute. Apparently Ms Conceicao is also in the habit of taking a taxi from Buona Vista MRT to Heng Mui Keng Terrace. This taxi fare of course accounts for most of the $7.86 cost of the featured commute. While a taxi is the fastest way to get from Buona Vista MRT to Heng Mui Keng terrace, there is in fact a straight bus (200) that goes from Buona Vista MRT to the junction of Heng Mui Keng Terrace and Pasir Panjang Rd. Ms Conceicao’s workplace, the Institute of Policy Studies, is a short walk from the bus stop at that junction. Another option is to take bus 95 from Buona Vista MRT to the NUS campus, where there is a complimentary internal shuttle that stops very near Heng Mui Keng Terrace. In short, it is completely unnecessary for Ms Conceicao to cab from Buona Vista MRT to her workplace. Of course, a cab is going to be faster than a bus, but the bus is going to be a darn sight cheaper. Ms Conceicao did not have to take a ridiculously circuitous route, pay $7.86, and 1 hour and 20 minutes to get from home to work each way. She could have taken the shorter MRT route, and/or she could have forgone the taxi ride. The ST’s inflation of the cost and time required for her commute smacks of sensationalism.

Perhaps one of the most telling indicators of elitism and stereotyping in Singapore is the question “What school were you from?” Even primary schools are taken as indicators of character and intelligence. Employers routinely insist on knowing which secondary school and JC you were from, even if you have tertiary qualifications. In casual social interactions, the question is used as a springboard to a slew of generalizations. “Oh you were from X? Then you must be such-and-such!” Not always spoken aloud of course.

Apparently, even our Dear Leader falls prey to this irrational tendency to evaluate a person in the light of her educational qualifications. He asked a journalist at a press conference what school she went to, even though she’d asked him a question completely irrelevant to education (and, indeed, irrelevant to her education in particular). One hopes that he was simply being mean and doesn’t really think that information was at all relevant to the issue at hand. Yes, this is what one is reduced to hoping for from our leaders.

Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple.

Some organisations and societies alienate those who appear to be cripples. They are useless in the current atmosphere, after all. Others attempt to create pockets where these cripples can flourish. One man’s oxygen is another man’s nitrogen dioxide. Creating an environment with pockets of atmospheres that are toxic to some but health-giving to others is technically difficult. And creates a risk of dangerous accidents. But if you homogenize your atmosphere, you become less adaptable to external stimuli and more at risk of dying out altogether. You may try to accommodate cripples anew, but after chasing them away for decades, winning their goodwill again is not a trivial matter.

*As this was taken from an old notebook, I cannot recall the specfic details of the edition, except that it was in paperback and translated by G. H. von Wright.