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.