56] Challenge our Undergraduates!

Challenge our Undergraduates!
ILLUMINATIONS
By Azly Rahman

Our graduates are increasingly unemployed, unemployable, and unable to analyze their environment not only because of the way they prepared themselves for this age of complexity and chaos but also because of how we prepare them in our universities.

Our nation continues to be in a crisis not only due to the declining standards in our rankings, the rising tide of mediocrity amongst the quality of our facultys’ thinking skills, the poor understanding of the concept of teaching to improve higher order thinking skills, the systematic and continuing emphasis of form over substance in our higher educational institutions, the systematic overuse of styles of totalitarian teaching and managing, and the lack of interest amongst our graduate to challenge themselves intellectually – all these are posing a threat to the future leaders we wish to create.

The crisis in higher education that came to public attention resulting in public outcry last year will continue to deepen as we see the issues plaguing it being strategically placed in the “in denial” mode. We are yet to see radical changes so that our universities will be ready to become institutions that will be “designed deliberately” to prepare our precious youth with the anticipatory skills needed to become critical, creative, ethical, and futuristic students. So that our graduates will become globally aware “socio-preneurs” ready to make this world a less violent place.

How do we prepare our undergraduates to become thinking global citizens? What are the challenges plaguing Humanity?

Our global challenges

Our world continues to be plagued with a range of issues that threaten our survival as a species. Below are amongst those we are facing.

Nationally we continue to live in a political system that is based not only on the deformed politics of race and economic greed that favors the rich and members of political dynasties but also a system that is threatened with a continuing disregard for human rights; fundamental principles of liberties that ought to protect minorities in a religiously pluralistic and complex state.

Nationally we continue to see abandoned hopes for our nation to evolve into a truly multicultural society as we witness the institutionalization of racism not only in the way we think and act daily but also in the way we construct our educational, cultural, economic and political institutions. The way we conduct our dialogue on religion and race have lately reflect a clearer and uglier politics of mistrust.

Globally we are faced with challenges in the areas of scientific advancement, morality, economics, ethnic and religious conflicts, population, and health.

Scientific advancements and control of knowledge and technology continue to be in the hands of the rich nations with the poor, “developing”, and “newly-industrializing and informationalizing” ones become slaves in the global production and consumption of technologies. Our scientific world of inquiry and human imagination to solve human problems has become a world of Orwellian drama; one of despair characterized by the use of science for deadly purposes.

Morality becomes a central issue of this millennium as we question our role as individuals that are defined by the means of subsistence/economic condition we are in. As human beings merely becomes “knowledge workers” and corporate executives in multinational corporations that have no national governments to answer to, they become merely one of the minute function of the machinery of global exploitation in the virtually all spheres of human activities.

And thus, one can still rationalize one’s work as a scientist in nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico, in an oil drill-company in Iraq, in pesticide-making subsidiary in the Philippines, a designer sneaker-producing company in Vietnam, or in a diamond-mining company in South Africa.

Global economics will continue to become a centerpiece of issues that our graduates will need to understand in order to become change agents and informed citizens in this precarious world of interdependence. The role of The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as twin instruments of global domination, borne out of post-World war II Bretton Woods agreement, continue to be challenged peacefully and violently as the world continues to produce more and more impoverished nations as a consequence of policies of ideological lendings and structurally imperialistic adjustments.

Presidents of the World Bank continue to be groomed from hawks of the American ultra-conservative mold.

Developments in Latin America of late are pointing towards a transformation of the people’s view towards economics – governments that favor the national poor and not the international plunderers will triumph at the polls.

Our planet earth, our global environment continue to be threatened by global warming, destruction of rain forest, carbon emission from fossil fuels (of which the military is the greatest consumer of oil), and the suffocating of our oceans. National governments continue to struggle with “natural disasters” that might have roots in how human beings plunder and rape nature or in the way we overuse our resources to feed our capitalist greed.

Each nation is in need of national governments that will be the least corrupt enough not to embark upon major projects that will not deforestate nature, create thicker and more dangerous industrial smog, dump toxic waste into rivers, and shave hilltops and hillsides for commercial and residential development projects. The challenges are that none of these issues are of interest to governments that profit from these systematic destructions that benefit the dynastic and corrupt few.

Ethnic and religious conflicts continue to splash the headlines of our global newspapers, with not only border conflicts perpetually increasing but deadly attacks of public places where the innocent work and play becoming a feature of post-September 11, 2001 fallout.

The prolonged occupation in Iraq and the obvious “no-victory-in-sight” of the American forces has become a national issue even in America – how long will she let her children die. Currently more than 2000 American soldiers have perished in a war over oil that has probably killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. [http://icasualties.org/oif/]

Though the destruction of Iraq is purely economic in nature, it is also perceived as a religious war that has wide-ranging and global ideological implications. The latest report on ben Ladin’s purportedly latest “warning against the Americans” continue to conjure the continuation of a “religious war” but in America however, this message has been overplayed. The American fear is now centering on the institutionalizing of a national wire-tapping.

Lastly, global health issues continue to be of concern especially with the continuing AIDS epidemic in Africa and now in all continents, the spread of Avian Flu, and re-emergence of small pox that might become the next global epidemic. No nation, by default of globalization, will be spared of the “enculturalization” of these epidemics – they have become a question of the “glocal” – the global and the local.


Our undergraduates must think

It is imperative that our universities prepare students to think like a scientist, and moralist, a futurist, and an activist in grasping a good understanding of all the issues I mentioned above. We must train out students to think relationally and holistically and to make them understand how the particulars explain the general, and how the parts fit in the whole.

Nationally, we must teach them how our government functions, how resources are allocated, and how conflicts emerge out of the political economic design. We may begin by having them analyze their own surrounding – how has the power been and how power is used to subjugate so that the mind of the students can be divided and conquered.

We may begin by challenging our university students to create a “perfect society” and by first questioning the historical and ideological premises upon which this present ruling government is built upon.

We may begin with this question: Is this the best Malaysians have done/achieved in terms of creating a government that respects human rights, encouraging freedom of speech, protecting the environment, managing ethnic and religious conflicts well, battling corruption and social ills sincerely, improving the quality of our educational institutions, and allocating the nation’s wealth justly?

Thinking globally for our undergraduates require our lecturers to be skilled in interdisciplinary thinking and to understand their role as “organic intellectuals”; ones whose role will be exemplars of critical thinking, the bastions of academic freedom and free inquiry, and finally the igniter of mental revolutions.

As Nietzsche once said: “Educate! … but first let us educate the educators”