M Ibrahim is a PhD researcher at the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice and previous lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia. In this post, he offers us a window into his life as an academic at an Indonesian law school.
Please introduce your academic role and your faculty. How does your law school and university fit in the higher education landscape in Indonesia?
Prior to starting my PhD, I worked for nearly five years as a lecturer in constitutional law at the Faculty of Law, Gadjah Mada University (Universitas Gadjah Mada) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Yogyakarta is a region with a rich cultural heritage and historical religious diversity. It is home to Prambanan, a prominent Hindu temple, and close to Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world – a reminder of the country’s pluralist past in today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia.
As a full-time academic at a public university in Indonesia, I had a variety of roles and responsibilities. These included teaching undergraduate students, supervising their dissertation projects, conducting original research, assisting with curriculum developments, and supporting the national and international accreditation programs of the Faculty. I also worked in a career development unit within the Faculty, which organised a monthly event on legal career for law students and conducted tracer studies to gather feedback from institutions and companies that hire our law graduates.
Gadjah Mada University is one of the oldest and largest public universities in Indonesia. It was founded in 1949, a few years after Indonesia declared independence. It is a secular university, in the sense that there is no specific religion or religious organisation affiliated with the university. However, as is the case with many public universities in the country, it is mandatory for undergraduate students to take a religion course in their first year. So, a Muslim student is required to take Islamic Religious Education; a Catholic student to take Catholic Religious Education, and so on. Each year the university admits around 10,000 students into a variety of faculties and schools. According to a recent report, the Faculty of Law admitted more than 900 new students into its undergraduate and graduate programs in 2023. The Faculty only has a little over 100 legal academics.
Why did you decide to become an academic and why you decided to specialise in your area of expertise?
Becoming an academic was not something I had in mind when I was younger. At the time I received a scholarship from the Australian government to pursue a Master of Laws (LLM) at the University of Melbourne in 2017, I hoped to become a human rights lawyer in Indonesia. At the time, I was thinking that I wanted to contribute by providing legal service to people in need but unable to afford access to justice. However, studying at an Australian university shifted my perspective. I was exposed to a wide range of academic discourses through the courses that I took, such as the philosophy of human rights and comparative constitutional law. Engaging with the course materials allowed me to reflect on legal issues from my position as someone from the Global South. I came to believe that contributing to the discourses by bringing my perspective shaped by my lived experience in Indonesia was something necessary and worthwhile.
After graduating, I joined the department of Constitutional Law at Gadjah Mada University. There, I taught a variety of courses including Indonesian Constitutional Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Legal Philosophy. In my research, I have specialised in Indonesian Constitutional Law, but some of my papers have also adopted a comparative perspective, drawing on jurisdictions such as South Korea. My current research focus is on law and religion. In Indonesia, as in many countries around the world, religion remains a powerful influence in how law is made, interpreted and applied in the state and society. But law and religion is not the only area that I am eager to contribute to. Recently, I have become increasingly interested in the study of judicial behaviour from an empirical perspective. I believe that insights from social and political sciences can help us to better understand and observe legal phenomena.
What have been the key influences on your teaching practises?
There were a number of important things that shaped my teaching practises. In terms of approach, I adopted some of the methods that my former professors at Melbourne used in their teaching and applied them to my teaching at Gadjah Mada. For example, I encouraged active student participation and prepared carefully reading materials and recent cases for discussion. At UNSW, I have learned a range of different strategies and learning activities to improve student engagement, which include think-pair-share, interactive polls, structured class debates, and peer feedback exercises. I wish to incorporate these strategies into my teaching in the future.
Regarding readings, I often drew from academic literature in the English language to expose my students to a broad range of legal issues with different perspectives and orientations. From my observation, Indonesian students who are interested in constitutional law tend to hold a very nationalist orientation, rather than a more comparative and cosmopolitan one. That said, I often assigned readings on Indonesian law and society by Western scholars such as Melissa Crouch, Simon Butt and Tim Lindsey as well as Indonesian scholars including Nadirsyah Hosen and Stefanus Hendrianto. I also introduced my students to the work of some of the leading scholars in comparative constitutional law including Ran Hirschl, Ros Dixon and Tom Ginsburg. I hope the curated readings encouraged my students to think critically and expand their horizons to include global and comparative perspectives even if their primary interest is Indonesian constitutional law.
How would you describe the priorities and support at your law school for teaching and research, and to what extent is such support influenced by external factors?
In general, Indonesian academics are expected to juggle a lot. At the Faculty of Law I worked in, academics are expected to teach at least 5 to 6 courses per semester and conduct original research as well as perform significant administrative roles. A lot of the administrative work related to accreditation and bureaucratic reporting often overshadow teaching and research. From my personal experience, the system seems to treat academics more like civil servants during the Suharto authoritarian regime era (1966-1998), rather than independent scholars, as it requires them to carry out numerous tasks with little regard to their commitments and wellbeing. And yet, salaries remain very modest, even compared to other developing countries in Southeast Asia. According to reporting by Kompas, Indonesia’s top newspaper, academic salaries in Indonesia are among the lowest in the region.
The government’s policy to internationalise higher education has affected many aspects of how universities operate. Indonesian universities now increasingly offer English-language programs and urge staff to publish in international journals. While this means that more Indonesian academics are attending international conferences and engaging with broader academic literature, many are not provided with adequate institutional training and support. For instance, the pressure to publish in international journals has unwittingly led many Indonesian academics to publish in predatory journals as long as they are indexed by Scopus and assigned an SJR ranking.
There are, however, some emerging reforms, as academics are beginning to organise and form unions to advocate for better pay and improved working conditions. At the Faculty of Law where I worked, there was some support provided. For example, there were internal grants to support research and attend academic conferences abroad. There were also financial incentives for publication in Scopus-indexed journals. However, these do not yet solve the structural problems in Indonesia’s higher education system, as many academics continue to face heavy workloads with little institutional and government support. I hope there will be real and meaningful reforms in the country’s higher education system.
Image: The iconic Buddhist Borobudur temple near Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2018. Taken by the author.