The nation's oldest university, Universiti Malaya, conceded that it deserved its lowly ranking in the latest world university rankings survey published by the UK-Times Higher Education Supplement.

The university has been steadily dropping in the ranks over the years. In the latest survey, it slid down a further 23 places to 192. In 2004, the university was ranked 89.

This drop also allowed Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) to overtake UM as the nation's foremost varsity when it rose to 185 from last year's 289.

Speaking at a press conference which was called following the latest survey, UM vice-chancellor Rafiah Salim admitted that the university has much to do to regain its deteriorating position.

"It must be that we have not done enough it terms of meeting the (survey's) requirement. In the next 12 months, we have to specifically address each of this criteria," she said at the press conference held at the UM campus in Kuala Lumpur this afternoon.

She also admitted that UKM's higher positioning in the survey would mean that UM can no longer identify itself as the nation's premier university.

"In our new mission statement (to be unveiled), we have actually dropped the adjective 'premier'. We don't want to keep on believing and living on our past glory, we would like to build from where are we now," added Rafiah, who is just five months into her VC post.

Saddest day

Rafiah added that UM has already taken steps to improve itself even before the authoritative survey was released.

In the past few months, she said, the university had started improvisation works on planning, strategising and implementing key performance indexes at every level within the university. The latter has never been done before.

The key performance indexes which UM aspires to do well in cover more than the six criteria stipulated in the Times survey.

Crestfallen with the survey, Rafiah said: "I must say this is perhaps one of the saddest days in my career... (Paused) Look at my colleagues, everybody is very disappointed.

She was referring to the other universities officials present at the press conference. These include UKM VC Prof Dr Sharifah Hapsah Syed Hasan Shahabudin, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) VC Prof Dr Nik Mustapha R Abdullah and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) deputy VC Prof Rosihan Mohd Ali.

"(The result of the ranking) is probably a way of getting the UM family really together in bringing up UM again," added Rafiah.

The four universities, in a joint statement, said they were "generally encouraged" by the 2006 Times ranking although UM has dropped in the ranking.

"The details of the 2006 rankings are not yet available. This is where the value of the THES rankings lies. Mere rank numbers alone do not help much except to indicate the relative position of one university to another," the universities said in the statement.

"Thus, even if an university were to perform better than 2005 in each of the component, its ranking drop if other universities perform even better," they added.

UKM: Aiming to be No 1

The annual rankings are done based on measures like peer review (40 percent), staff to student ratio (20 percent), the number of times research is cited by other academic (20 percent), employer survey (10 percent), international faculty and international students (five percent each).

Details of this year's criteria however are yet to be made available.

Meanwhile, UKM's Sharifah said the rankings should not be used as the sole yardstick to gauge the universities performance since there are many other ways to judge a university's performance, such as its response to the country's socio-economic needs.

She humbly declined to describe UKM's latest ranking as a success, saying: "It is not (a success) until we reach No 1."

In the ranking, USM and UPM respectively also improved this year's standings with UPM rising from 394 last year to 292, while USM climbed from 326 to 277.

In a related development, Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang said the UM's latest standing only showed its "30-year decline, fall and fall from internationally recognised excellence to mediocrity."

"Malaysians are not asking our public universities to scale new heights never achieved before - but to restore the academic eminence, standards, excellence and quality which Universiti Malaya had enjoyed in the 60s and even the 70s," he said in a statement.