3. RESEARCH, TEACHING, AND SERVICE AS ESSENTIAL FACETS OF PROFESSORSHIP
Andy is a staunch believer in the need to be serious about research, teaching, and service as essential components of the professorial vocation. Anyone who neglects even one of these is, in his view, an ‘incomplete’ professor. Andy himself works hard to excel in all three.
As a scholar and award-winning scientist, he has published hundreds of highly cited international papers on heterometallic syntheses, homogeneous catalysis, and supramolecular assembly. Frequently invited to give keynote and plenary lectures at international conferences and symposia, Andy has won a number of fellowships and held visiting professorships at many universities. He has been of service to top journals in an editorial and advisory capacity. He has also chaired many international and regional conferences and symposia.
As a teacher, Andy has to date supervised around 30 doctoral, 20 Masters, and over 100 Honours students. He has also supervised the project work of more than 150 secondary and junior college students through a variety of programmes. Over the years, he has received numerous teaching awards, including the NUS Outstanding Educator Award in 2002.
Reflection 23: What other indicators of success in scholarship and teaching should be considered in formal assessments of faculty performance?
Andy’s stint as Head of Chemistry Department from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2005 to 2009 gave him tremendous satisfaction. He valued the opportunity to exercise academic leadership mainly because it authorized and empowered him to carry out with conviction his ideas for improving the department. He notes how it is not difficult to say what needs to be done to make things better, but gaining support for these ideas and implementing them are challenges that are best confronted by taking up formal leadership roles. As Head, for instance, he was able to hire some really talented people and obtain resources to improve departmental infrastructure. Over half of the faculty members in the Chemistry Department today were hired under his leadership.
Reflection 24: What leadership roles have you played at NUS? What were you hoping and able to achieve as a leader? Is there much scope for making positive changes outside of the formal leadership structure at NUS, through ground initiatives for instance? Is there a need for more active citizenship and perhaps even activism among faculty, students, and staff at NUS?
Looking back, Andy remembers that there were always some colleagues who opposed him when he led the department. There were also colleagues who always worked against the system. However, he maintained confidence in his ideas and was sufficiently transparent so that his colleagues knew that decisions were made in everyone’s interest and not his own. By being reliably consistent, he gained the confidence of others. Looking back, however, Andy does not think that he was a very popular department Head. Perhaps he was too eager to make changes when he thought things were too stagnant. Perhaps he was too much of a results-oriented disciplinarian and his manner was too abrasive. He admits to being, at the time, intolerant of mediocrity and often complained that ‘people tend to talk too much and act too little’. He admires leaders like Margaret Thatcher who act on what they believe to be right, rather than what they think the people want.
Reflection 25: What is your leadership style? Do you model yourself after any particular leaders? What adjustments need to be made when leadership models or approaches are applied in academic contexts?
But he had also learnt from the mistakes he had made as OUHKS President many years ago, trying to temper his strong convictions with a more consultative approach that was sensitive to people’s needs and that sought to understand other people’s perspectives.
Reflection 26: How should authority be expressed and exercised at NUS, given the peculiar nature of academics and students? Is collegiality possible with/without authoritarian leadership? How can academics be mobilized around organizational needs and interests without compromising their professional autonomy (or bruising their egos)?
Now that he is older and wiser, Andy feels that he has become more cautious, even though he is more confident in himself than he ever was.
Reflection 27: How have you changed over the years as an academic? Looking back, are you happy with this evolution? What do you think when you meet young(er) academics who may have a fresh, perhaps idealistic, or even unrealistic view of the academic profession?
Looking back, he acknowledges that there have been occasions when he was too impulsive in making major management decisions. This came from being an instinctive person with an impatient and opportunistic nature. When he was Vice Dean (Academic) of the Faculty of Science, Andy introduced a mentorship system to address what he perceived to be a weakening of ‘class spirit’ among students who were not only becoming more atomized by the new modular system, but also encountering a range of administration-related problems. The students needed better advisory support and he felt that more faculty members and staff needed to be engaged to help. From his experience at Oxford University and Imperial College London, he believed that the NUS students could also benefit from personal academic tutorship. Together with the Dean, he pushed through a new mentorship system, whose basic idea had been mooted, conceived, and implemented faculty-wide all within a month. The system is still in place today. However, Andy acknowledges its many problems. As an all-encompassing and non-discretionary programme for such a large faculty, the mentorship system was bound to lack the kind of ‘personal touch’ that it had been set up to provide. It was, therefore, self-defeating. In the impulsive drive to set up such a large programme, not enough attention had been paid to assessing alternative arrangements and working out the operational details. In hindsight, Andy would, today, set up the mentorship system on a more selective and voluntary basis, targeting a much smaller group of students who genuinely need support and recruiting a much smaller group of faculty members who are genuinely prepared to spend quality time with students.
Reflection 28: Is there a mentorship system for students in your faculty? If not, do you think your faculty needs one? If your faculty does already have one, does it work well? What improvements could be made to the system?
Andy is today disappointed by the way many faculty are just too narrowminded about their academic life, thinking it is just a matter of publishing many papers and teaching some classes. They also tend to put their service responsibilities on the back burner. Today, department Heads are generally advised not to give young academics too many responsibilities. Andy rarely turned away the responsibilities offered to him. In fact, he liked to take on challenges and got a lot of satisfaction out of them. Although the material rewards for service are few, he has been rewarded with less tangible benefits. For instance, his efforts to introduce programmes that have made his department more internationally visible and competitive are appreciated particularly by a number of younger colleagues. Students also appreciate his teaching and administrative work, and are keen to join his laboratory research team. As well, service has been a kind of pressure-relief mechanism, which has helped strike a healthy balance in his academic career. Today, NUS is a great place to develop a career in research. But he feels that NUS should also incentivize faculty to develop a fuller profile as a professor. He believes that faculty on a professorial track need to distinguish themselves from full-time researchers by finding a good balance among research, teaching, and service interests. It is, as Andy readily admits, necessary to know one’s capacity and limits, since everyone is different. But if one can manage it, one should not immediately decline taking up responsibilities as an automatic response.
Reflection 29: Do you tend to automatically regard invitations to take up new responsibilities as additional work that you have no time for, or as a means of exploiting your labour? Do you think of such invitations as a signal of how valuable you are to the organization and as a sign that your prospects are good?
Part of the problem, Andy believes, is that many faculty assume straightaway that there are conflicting demands from the three facets of the professorial vocation. Andy, instead, thinks that whatever he does in one area can have a positive impact on his performance in the other two. For instance, Andy has found that his administrative responsibilities have enabled him to pick up valuable skills in people management, skills that directly help his teaching and research. As an experimental scientist, he finds ideas and inspiration not only from reading, but also from working with industry professionals, consulting for policymakers, mentoring school children, organizing conferences and workshops, and so on. This, for him, is one of the benefits of serving as President of the Singapore Institute of Chemistry. Unfortunately, he sees too many colleagues turning down such opportunities because they think they are too busy.
Reflection 30: How much professional contact do you maintain with parties outside of the NUS community, for instance industry players, government ministries, schools, and so on? Have you found these contacts to be helpful to you in your research, teaching, and service work?
The practice at Oxford University offers a good example of possible synergies between research and teaching. As these two areas are really quite complementary, a world-class research university does not mean first-rate research and third-rate teaching. At Oxford, both scholarship and teaching are highly valued. Oxford professors commonly discuss their latest research in tutorial sessions. Typically, students at great institutions like Oxford and Yale Universities rarely get excited about the things that they read in textbooks. Instead, they are eager to know about the latest developments in their professors’ research laboratories. Naturally, professors whose teaching involves the sharing of their own research tend to attract the best graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Thus, professors should not treat research and teaching as discrete pillars, but should try to build bridges across these pillars.
Reflection 31: How much of your latest research have you been able to introduce into your classroom? How much of the curriculum and teaching materials that you develop have grown into research papers or projects? Have you collaborated with your students through innovative assignments to jointly publish good quality research? Have you done any educational research using the experiences and data obtained from classroom teaching?
By holding the professorial vocation to such high standards, Andy admits that he is ambitious, in the sense that he wants to do his best in whatever it is he chooses to do. He also thinks big and believes that talented people should do big things to prevent their talent from being untested, unused, and wasted. In his pursuit of excellence, did he have to sacrifice anything in his personal life? Andy married relatively late in life at 40 years of age. When he was a single man, he could work day and night. Social life was never a real priority for him, but he managed not to have to give up his love of playing football. He now has three daughters, whom he has named Kar Yin (嘉研, which means good research), Wai Yin (惠研, which means beneficial research), and Tzi Yin (芷研, which means plant or natural product research). Their names reflect Andy’s research agenda and its contribution to modern society.
Reflection 32: Do you feel that you have neglected important aspects of your life? What is the cost of becoming a successful professor? Is there a way of avoiding or transforming these costs? Do you belong to a peer support group, however informal, that can collectively think through these issues with you? Do you think that faculty members who are women can relate to Andy’s experiences, particularly where personal, family, and social life are concerned?
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