Indonesia’s higher education minister has chastised the country’s senior academics for allowing complacency to stifle the scientific culture needed to drive the archipelago’s “social and economic transformation”.
Brian Yuliarto, a former nanotechnology professor who became minister for higher education, science and technology in early 2025, criticised his erstwhile colleagues for losing interest in research once they had secured tenure.
“After getting the professor’s positions, they…forget to do research because they already have a position,” Yuliarto told Times Higher Education’s Global Sustainable Development Congress in Jakarta. “They are in the comfort zone [where] they do not research any more.
“Here in Indonesia…[when people have] the position of professor, we cannot take down the position.”
He also criticised universities for attempting to game the rankings. “Several campuses…have [a] strategy to influence other people to cite their papers [so that] they can improve the numbers of citations. This is not the way we can improve our quality. The quality, I believe, has to be improved by improving the scientific culture.”
