47] Ranking our totalitarian universities

Ranking our totalitarian varsities
Azly Rahman
Nov 21, 05 6:18pm


How must we rank ourselves?

I write in honour of Universiti Utara Malaysia's (UUM) recent official rejection to reinstate two of its faculty members, myself and my wife Dr Mutiara Mohamad. We refused to sign the Surat Akujanji (Pledge of Loyalty) and still refuse to do so. This answer came after almost one year of waiting.

This self-proclaimed ‘Harvard of the East’ needs to be ranked the world's number one university for stifling critical and divergent thinking. The minister of higher education continues to sanction this practice. Enough have we debated on the ranking of our universities which demoralise the work of our hardworking academics who aspire to become public and organic intellectuals. Many have written publicly to voice the idea that there is a growing hunger for our universities to be radically transformed.

Public intellectuals are needed as antidotes to slow down this intellectual degeneration we are experiencing. We have the potential of producing towering intellectuals such as Syed Hussein Al Alatas, KS Jomo, Syed Husin Ali, Ungku Aziz, and Kassim Ahmad, and many more who brooked no fear nor favour. Malaysian public universities must now produce this new generation of radical thinkers amongst them, ones that will shake off the malaise and lethargy of the pathetic condition we have caged ourselves in.

"Learn from Ivy League"

We must aspire to scholarly greatness so that we can become special in our own way. We should be ranked according to the criteria of, for example, major American Ivy League universities whose historically well-earned athletic and academic rigour have become benchmarks of best practices in higher education.

While eminent universities in advanced nations pride themselves in promoting and defending to their death diversity in thinking and academic freedom, our universities are proud of their ability to shrink the brains by killing academic freedom. Universities in the free world continue to produce profound thinkers.

The culture that produced Columbia's Edward Said, MIT's John Nash and Noam Chomsky, Princeton's Clifford Geertz, Harvard's John Rawls or University of Colorado's Ward Churchill is the culture that promotes the freedom of thought and expression. In America, totalitarian documents such as the Surat Akujanji or Auku would have been long shredded to pieces and scattered into the river, in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party during America's revolutionary times.

The major institutions of the Ivy League remain autonomous, producing radical critique of even the current Bush Administration policy on Iraq and the Middle East. The radicalism of the late Professor Edward Said for example, earned him the honour of being named Columbia University's University Professor as well as world-wide recognition as an intellectual icon who spoke for the Palestinians.

"Mental colonisation at work"

But a different culture continues to be engineered in Malaysia - a culture that is cancerous to the respect for intellectual freedom we are trying to create. It is the culture of fear. This is the culture that guillotines outspoken students and professors in the courtyard of the university, but at the same time a culture that presents Malaysia as a ‘regional and international hub’ for education in order to attract international students from, for example, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, and the Maldives, to study our democratic institutions.

Why would international students learn this brand of totalitarianism and ‘Asian despotic democracy bred by past autocrats’ in campuses wherein students are being hunted down for speaking up? In which professors prefer to keep silent for fear of being demoted or dismissed?

In the Abdullah Ahmad Badawi administration this is an unannounced guarantee that universities remain institutions of totalitarianism wherein academics speaking out against intellectual decadence and political drunkenness are asked to write show-cause letters for exercising their basic rights. It is imperative for our universities to remain ‘Prozac-ed’ so that the machinery of the Malaysian corporatist nation can iron-cage it and gag its students and faculty?

Our university students are not seeing the picture of mental colonisation when they think that the University and the University Colleges Act (UUCA) is meant to ‘protect’ campus democracy. It is now understandable how hegemony in academia operates. We are creating another generation of authoritarian leadership whose ticket to success will be to emulate despotic rulers. This is shameful thinking, coming from decades of a bountiful cultivation of fear and favouritism.

How shameful an opinion on ‘protectionist democracy’ from Malaysia's university students as we read of the repercussions of the recent campus elections. How effective this Akademi Fantasia in academia works. How fertile will the mind of our children be for the cultivation of dogmas, doctrines and docilities, however dangerous they may be designed to work. This is the ultimate "imagined community" Cornell University's Benedict Anderson might say - a community founded on shallow understanding of democracy.

It is only fair that we should be ranked within the highest10 in the rankings for totalitarianism amongst the world's universities. We have already failed, as a nation, in the rankings for political integrity, having had leaders in power for as long as their Machiavellian and Sun Tzu philosophy allowed them to. We have created a system of thought-control through the despotism of the previous administrations and through the use of cleverly-ideologised systems of control such as ‘Taylorism’, ‘Total Quality Management’ and ‘work as religious-devotion’ (kerja sebagai ibadat).

Why have our universities declined shamefully under the continuing control of the present government of Barisan Nasional, a governmental-coalition of despots that trumpets the slogan ‘world class’ for everything it does, from infrastructure to strategies used to silence its university students and academics?

"A dozen symptoms"

Here are some thoughts on the reasons behind academia’s Alzheimer's disease with which we are afflicted with:

Our universities have lost their sense of historic and philosophical mission; we are seeing them shackled by a post-colonialist corporatist ideology that has developed and is increasingly bankrupting our national-intellectual resources.

Our vice-chancellors are merely pleasing their political masters, they seem to be imitating the role of a mini-politician. Their creativity and sense of democracy is ‘guided’ by a philosophy of instrumentalism and the politics of swashbuckling and kris-wielding.

Our academic staff are overwhelmingly afraid to speak up on issues that matter most to the destiny of the nation: increasing authoritarianism, Oriental Despotism, technocracy, the plundering of our national wealth by the ruling elites, destruction of our rainforests and environment, blind following of the ideology of developmentalism and the silencing of the civil servants as well as the academicians.

Our varsity students are being treated like extensions of Malaysian primary school pupils and they, in turn, treat the university as a place wherein facts are merely to be regurgitated at the end of the semester examinations; they now expect to be spoon-fed even during job interviews.

Our campuses are becoming a battleground of political leaders from the ‘pro-aspirasi kerajaan’ (pro-government) camps and the 'pro-pembangkang' (pro-opposition) camps The words aspiration and opposition are cleverly used to create the ‘good guy versus bad guy’ dichotomy in Malaysian politics, masking the real issue - we need a brand new political order altogether.

Our classrooms are turning to be real lecture theaters wherein the lecturers and the professors are not keen to engage in dialogical, dialectical, and didactical teaching. We need teaching faculties trained to teach higher order thinking skills in all subject areas.

Our minister of higher education continues to make contradictory statements concerning freedom on campus - on the one hand he is sanctioning the firing of outspoken academics and students, on the other he is thinking that a Hyde Park in every university would be a good idea to promote free speech.

Our universities are more interested in specialising themselves into this and that university - Management, Multimedia, Agricultural, Technology, Social Sciences, the Arts, etc. etc. - undermining the value of a broad and strong foundation of the arts and humanities that ought to form the basis of any institution called a university.

Our academicians do not produce enough bodies of knowledge; ones that would challenge every aspect of the foundation of ideas that is prevailing. We continue to produce a knowledge base that is ‘instrumental reason’ and technocratic in nature, produced out of lecture theaters, tutorial rooms, and textbook-publishing houses that fail to critique the dominant ideology.

Our universities are not only funded by the ruling coalition that is under scrutiny for big-time corruption, but also by corporations at home and abroad that are interested in seeing that the graduates are graduating from the mould of the corporate-government-industrial complex.

Our universities are fertile grounds for the indoctrination of ideas and the funneling down of slogans - from ‘the idea of a K-economy’ to ‘Islam Hadhari’, from the slogan ‘kepimpinan melalui teladan’ (leadership by example), ‘bersih, cekap, amanah’ (clean, efficient, and trustworthy) to ‘cemerlang, gemilang, terbilang' (glorious, fabulous, and world-famous).

Our graduates were churned out from a diploma mill that produced them for only three years and we now have unemployed graduates by the tens of thousands. They were given the promise to finish early; they ended up without jobs as a guarantee. We now have 60,000 unemployed graduates impatiently waiting for jobs to come to them.

"Cultural philosophy"

Our politicians, especially those involved in education beginning from the time of Independence, have not clearly understood the role of a university in a nation that is coming out of the shackles of colonialism. What roads need we take to reconstruct our public universities, or at least to improve our rankings? We must go back to our cultural philosophy for possible solutions.

We ought to be able to come up with an educational manifesto that will profoundly change the intellectual and imaginative landscape of our practice. How must we do this, collectively?