The Academic Promotion Process in Malaysian Public Universities: In Search of Best Practices.

The expansion and transformation of Malaysian public universities have generated major changes in the nature of academic employment and the structure of academic promotion in all types of institutions of higher education. These changes have considerable implications in particular for expectations in academic promotion. This paper describes the academic promotion processes in Malaysian public universities and examines the different criteria as well as the weighting assigned to the criteria. Results obtained from document analysis show that there are six core criteria for promotion in the 18 public universities surveyed. Furthermore, there are distinct and significant differences in the application of promotion criteria to different ranks by institution type, with the majority of the universities much more likely to use and give higher weighting to research and publication criteria. This article considers some higher education policies and approaches towards developing an academic promotion system which is fairer and which is better aligned to the mission or type of university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]