What Asia really wants

By Bernard Lane. WESTERN education, not Asian languages, is what Asia expects of Australia, according to Adelaide University's Warren Bebbington.
"Asia looks to Australia not as a centre of study for Asian language, but as a beacon of Western education and culture in Asia," Professor Bebbington said.
The vice-chancellor was commenting on the government's Asian Century white paper with its emphasis on "Asia-relevant capabilities" including expertise in Asian studies and languages.
He said the report misunderstood the values that Asia sought in Australia.
"What Asia wants from our leading universities is western scientific method, western thought; not Asian cultural study, something they could get better at home," he said.
"This is why the best Asian universities are urgently moving to teaching in English.
"It would be better if the current decline in Asian languages and culture in our schools was reversed, but I don't actually think that is as pivotal as is suggested."
Professor Bebbington, who used to be pro vice-chancellor for global relations at the University of Melbourne, is a critic of global university rankings as a poor guide to the quality of teaching.
"Students the world over use rankings for advice on which particular teaching program, at what campus to enrol in," he said in a speech in August.
"Most don't realise that many of the rankings scarcely measure teaching or the campus experience at all. They mostly measure research outcomes."
He singled out the Shanghai Jiao Tong league table for its research bias. That ranking has been given quasi-official status by the government's white paper, which states a "national objective" that Australia will have 10 universities in the top 100 by 2025. There are five this year. An OECD project to devise global measures of learning outcomes offers a potential corrective to the research bias of rankings such as the Jiao Tong.
However, the depleted treasuries of the developed world and university apprehension about the nature and use of the new OECD measure may prevent its development. A feasibility study for the measure, called the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes, has been finished.