Interview with Dr Anies Baswedan of Paramadina University

Partnerships

Dr Anies Baswedan

gbg	Paramadina University is a young institution, what have been the main strategies to position the university on the educational map?
Dr Anies Baswedan	Primarily, we established ourselves as a university that is progressive in terms of our approach and vision. We do not envision ourselves as huge in size and we approach the government and industry sector in a strategic way. We try to make the connections for our students from when they study at high school to university until they go to work and our aim is to produce the best possible graduates for Indonesia. Many of the brightest students in Indonesia cannot afford to go to university so we facilitate that through a program from high school. We involve the private sector, and place the responsibility not only on the government to produce the best graduates; but on them as well. We work with many local companies such as Astra International.
gbg	Research is an area that Indonesian universities have failed to really make a mark, what are the challenges in producing quality research?
Dr Anies Baswedan	The biggest challenge is language and language proficiency. Once that is there, access to the state of the art technology and research will be there too. The second is benchmarking; one must benchmark high to generate research that will be used by the global community and not only published but quoted as it is something new. The way we try to achieve this is by stimulating our faculty members to publish regionally and then globally, but this takes time it will not be achieved in the short term. If we stay on the right track and develop the country’s language proficiency then it will emerge eventually.
gbg	How is Paramadina University contributing to creating Indonesia’s future leaders?
Dr Anies Baswedan	We have a leadership program that creates responsible leaders and contributes to improving access to education in regions outside of Java, as Indonesia has a shortage of teachers there. It is the Indonesia Mengajar Foundation; we take the top university students under 25 years of age and give them training in teaching skills, we then send them out to teach at schools in some of the most remote regions for one year. They are completely responsible for the curriculum and their organisation although we stay in touch with them. This initiative is very popular; the participants develop skills that are highly sought after by employers after they have completed the program. This teaches leadership skills as well as social responsibility, as outside of Java there is a low concentration of schools and universities and this must be addressed.