In mid-April, I was on a research trip in Asia. The moment I stepped out of the air-conditioned Hong Kong International Airport, a wave of heat and humidity pressed down and clung to my skin. As I spent the following weeks in both Hong Kong and Singapore, I began to feel a different kind of pressure weighing on me—one about discourses on quality education and research in this part of the world.

Over my stay in Asia, I was fortunate to have the opportunities to connect with researchers, educators, and teachers to get to know a bit more about the research and teaching situation here. Although I was born in Hong Kong and had spent much of my adult life here, my over twenty years of living and working overseas have created a distance between me and my birthplace.

While visiting a prestigious university in the region, I was struck by the numerous posters, banners, and computer screensavers all reporting celebrated university metrics—enrollment rates, performance indicators, sand university rankings, and others! This is not the only university that embraces these numbers; many others follow the same approach. Of course, this metric-obsessed culture is hardly unfamiliar in North America, yet I had never experienced it in such an extreme form before.

In conversations with several young professors preparing their tenure applications, I found they were frustrated that only their publications in tier-one journals would be counted towards their dossiers. One assistant professor divulged how she wished she could pursue research based on genuine passions, rather than funding and quick publications. Another female professor, anticipating her tenure review in two years, sought reassurance by asking whether her more than thirty publications, all in tier‑one journals, would suffice, only to discover that the university administration demanded even more. She lamented that she couldn’t publish as prolifically and efficiently as some of her unmarried or childless male peers. As a mother, she finds that childcare still falls so heavily on her shoulders, despite her husband’s reliable support.

This metrics-driven culture is no stranger in the academic world in North American academia and beyond. But to have this intense level of demand for measurable output and countable achievements is daunting to me. No wonder many young scholars, though with a genuine passion to make a difference in education, are interpellated by this crushing ideological call (Althusser, 1971), yielding their research agenda and outcomes to numbers and counts.  

In conversation with a senior researcher who also serves as department chair in one of the top universities in Asia, I heard him astutely observe that the university’s relentless fixation on key performance indicators has taught young scholars to “play the game”, meeting quantitative requirements, often with little regard for their genuine interests or the passions that fueled them to pursue doctoral studies in the first place. If that’s indeed the case, I couldn’t help but ask myself where lies the quality of research? Of course, some might disagree with me, arguing that research quality lies in the validity, reliability, and generalizability of the research design; whether one enjoys doing the study can be a non-essential matter. But the pressure has already driven some researchers to seek shortcuts. Increasingly, we hear accounts of data fabrication or falsification, and the use of Gen AI to produce papers.

Further, who created the tier-one journal list? Yes, it is based on whether a journal has a rigorous review process and a high impact factor. But how are such results truly obtained, beyond a low acceptance rate and a high citation count? These criteria are highly unreliable because citation distributions across journal articles are heavily imbalanced, with a small fraction accounting for most citations (DORA, 2012). The impact factor of a journal also varies depending on the field and types of articles (e.g., research versus review articles), and can be manipulated by editorial policy, for example, deliberately keeping a low acceptance rate to maintain the status of the journal. When assessing the real impact of research, should we not also consider the substantive impact of research? For example, does it reshape teachers’ practice or inform shifts in school language policy, especially aspects that cannot be easily tallied or quantified?

Equally concerning is that these top-tier journals often adhere to monolingual English norms in their publication practices. Researchers doing work on mother tongue education or minority languages in this part of the world are similarly under pressure to publish in English, although it would make much more sense for them to write in the very language(s) that they try to promote and preserve. The department chair I mentioned earlier had attempted to support his faculty members’ mother-tongue focused research by resisting the university’s demand for publications in “high-caliber” international journals, questioning how publications in these English-only outlets could possibly contribute to the revitalization of mother-tongue education. This chair’s advocacy for differentiated criteria in evaluating mother-tongue education researchers has resulted in some flexibility in their tenure review. However, the overall demand to achieve quantifiable outputs remains more pronounced than in Canada.

Reflecting on research and merit-evaluation practice in Canada, the neoliberal benchmarking mechanisms remain pervasive; yet at least voices of resistance persist. Increasingly, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, https://sfdora.org/read/ ) is being cited as the guiding framework for research assessment. For example, the Tri-Council research agencies, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), are now requiring researchers to move away from a traditionally metrics-focused CV to one that is narrative-based, highlighting holistic contributions, contextualized achievements, and impact that speaks directly to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Internationally, we also see more researchers working on translanguaging and plurilingualism resisting established publishers’ strict Anglo-normative practices and negotiating to get their translingual or plurilingual work published (e.g., Tian & Zhang-Wu, forthcoming). Recently, I also learned that Language Awareness, a long-established international journal in the field of applied linguistics, has begun allowing abstracts to be published in an additional language alongside English. These steps may seem modest, yet transformative nonetheless, especially for researchers in non-English dominant educational contexts.

My three-week stay in Asia has opened my eyes towards neoliberal forces at work and the possible harmful impact on researchers and educators, particularly their emotional labour. Yet I also came to know that both governments in Hong Kong and Singapore have tremendous investments in education. In Singapore, for example, all students accepted into the teacher education programs are considered employees of the Ministry of Education. They are provided with not only free tuition, but also stipends for their living expenses. As for Hong Kong, professors and teachers enjoy significantly higher salaries than their counterparts in Canada, and the Education Bureau invests substantively in educational research. This stands starkly against the austerity measures currently constraining the education sector in Canada, which reflect a broader reluctance to prioritize investment in education. It is a challenge that the Canadian government must confront if it hopes to safeguard the quality of teaching and research. Shifting toward a non-metrics-centred approach to research assessment cannot, on its own, ensure quality if there is no concrete financial investment in teaching and research to support it in the first place.

References

Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In L. Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans.; pp. 127–186). Monthly Review Press.

American Society for Cell Biology. (2012). San Francisco declaration on research assessment (DORA). https://sfdora.org/read/

Tian, Z., & Zhang‑Wu, Q. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Writing ourselves otherwise: Translingual autoethnography and duoethnography in language education. Multilingual Matters.