92] Road to Academic Serfdom

Road to academic serfdom?
Azly Rahman
Oct 16, 06 11:12am

With apologies to Friedrich von Hayek's title of a critique of Keynesian ideology, I write about our academic serfdom. We are now at a juncture wherein the commanding heights of our intellectual freedom continue to be patrolled by politicians.

Academicians must now call for a jihad for the free market of ideas to reign. We must allow the unfettered growth of schools of thoughts – the Asli school, the Bangi school (UKM), the Petaling Jaya school (UM), the Shah Alam school (UiTM), or even the Sintok-Changlun school (UUM) - to reign over the unstimulating yet hegemonising school of thought of Putrajaya.
We must allow our learning institutions to be inspired by the work of historical powerhouses of ideas such as Plato's Academy, the Baghdad School of the Khaifah Al Rashidin, the Al Ghazalli Circle, the Salon of the Paris Commune, the Berlin Council of Logical Positivists, the Vienna Circle, the Annales School, the Frankfurt School, the Chicago School, the Ali Shariati School, the Birmingham School, the Havana School of Che Guevara, or even the less respectable Bretton Woods School (of the World Bank-IMF instrument of global domination) and many others that do not succumb to the controlling interests of the politics of the day.

Although I believe that no researcher is free from personal and political ideology, institutional control or the politics of knowledge, nor free from the bias of methodological choice, I do not think any academician should resign over an "error" of a research finding. To do so would mean to allow politics to pave the way for academic serfdom.

In the final analysis and in our dissertation on this great Malaysian multiculturalism society, we will only build strong pillars of totalitarianism. Limitations of research design should be a good enough ground for refutation of any finding. It is this "philosophy of finding out" that ought to guide us as an intelligent nation wishing to improve our knowledge-producing institutions.

Through its mission statement The Asian Strategic Leadership Institute's (Asli) Center for Public Policy Studies (CPPS) claims to advocate a new genre of rigorous, non-partisan, intellectually stimulating, critical approach to doing research:

The CPPPS is an independent and non-partisan public policy institute that aims at fostering open-minded dialogue, enlightened leadership and better governance. The belief underpinning the establishment of the CPPS is that the challenge of building a cohesive, competitive and successful multi-racial Malaysian society can best be met by open discussion buttressed by rigorous analytical work and a spirit of tolerance and respect for the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders in the country (CPPS mission statement, 2006).

Such is an encouraging and refreshing statement.

How many research centers in our public universities pledge commitment to an open dialogue in documenting, discussing and disseminating issues of concern? How many of our researchers produce good research findings based on newer and alternative perspectives, unchained by the melodies of governmental orchestration? If we are afraid to explore and embrace the essence of Critical Theory and use it to inform our research practices, we are missing a fundamental intellectual superstructure of social improvement.

Malay versus non-Malay issue?

I am saddened by the resignation of Dr Lim Teck Ghee, a respected academician pressured by unrespectable circumstances. If there is a "race dimension" to this issue, it is the perception that Malays cannot handle research findings intelligently. The Malays continue to be damaged and criminalised by these perceptions formed by the act of their elected representatives who are too busy getting themselves stay elected but too lazy getting themselves educated.
I see this as an epic game of historical-materialistic perception, played on the genealogical theatre of the national psyche and the cultural-deconstructionistic mind. The script that portrays the triumphant possibilities of the mind of the intelligent masses was stolen by those who own the quill, particularly the istana-appointed scribes of Malay heroic epics. These are the "intellectual elites" paid to write the history of the rich and powerful.

The everyday Malays are much more intelligent than what is projected as this "historical construction" of the "then-now-and-forever" perception makers. The damage on the perception of the Malays have been done; partly as a result of the phenomena of the coloniser-colonised paradigm of mental colonisation in which oppressed natives become oppressors who use the model of patronage politics to pacify the radical intellectual instincts of the natives through the process of socialisation, indoctrination and symbolic gift-giving.
Against the backdrop of this uproar surrounding the Asli report, our academic world continue to tolerate such displays of totalitarianism, among these:

* in UPM, students who harassed others were set scott free without any action taken
* in all universities, the game of repealing and reforming the University and University Colleges Act continue to be played
* in USM, Biro Tata Negara-training module continues to teach one race how to hate others, conjuring stories of conspiracies.

We are now confronted by another national panic – over a report.

Why have we come to a stage wherein a researcher needs to resign over a research finding? How do we evolve out of this seemingly intractable dilemma of "finding out" and offering critical perspectives? Are our politicians well-prepared enough to dialogue intelligently on the issue of research perspectives?

I believe that thinking Malays and academicians do not hold such a totalitarianising view towards the Asli finding. They just need more time to come out with alternative explanations to the question of ownership and control of wealth as a consequence of the New Economic Policy (NEP). There exist many perspectives in looking at the NEP. What remains damaging is not the report of the finding but how we let politicians speak for the academic community.

Academicians should speak louder

Who has the right to speak louder – politicians or intellectuals? How do we handle "controversial research findings" to reflect our national panic to become ranking universities? Though he must not claim presumed neutrality in his work, Lim has offered us Malaysians a challenge we must intelligently undertake. I offered a methodological perspective to this issue in a previous article on our "Thaksinised" economy. In it I wrote of the need for a new perspective in looking at our economic dilemma:

We have to destroy these old notions of "doing research" and "finding out" round and about this economic pie call the NEP. We must instead ask the question of "controlling interests", "interlocking directorateships" "control and ownerships of the governmentally-linked corporations", the "nature of campaign financing", the "siphoning of wealth" "the schooling of society into sophisticated labor", the "foreign bank accounts owned by the political-economic elites, the "nature and structure of corruption", and many other themes of the political-economy of development and underdevelopment of Malaysia we can constantly reflect upon.

We need to code those themes and find patterns of meaning in them so that we can help the silenced majority revolt against the structural oppression they have been designed into. In this new debate over numbers, the peasants, the laborers, the shopkeepers, the teachers, the rubber tappers, and the marginalised continue to be voiceless. What reigns in this public debate over who owns what is still the voices of those who speak of the poor without having much experience in what poverty feels, tastes and smells like.

To manage the nation we need scholar-politicians and philosopher-rulers who have risen above racial sentimentality. We are not seeing any emerging. We are seeing more sophisticated wannabe gung-ho race-based Young Turks grooming themselves in luxury in order to wrestle power. We do not need more Thaksin that will intoxicate the next generation of our children with the perception that Malaysia is a corporatist state whose wealth can be easily sold like pies even to foreign capitalists. We now have lost our sense of ethics in the way we cultivate our academic institutions.

No academician should be afraid to report on alternative truths. No one should bow down to political pressure in order to generate new knowledge. The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote about this during the reign of Mussolini. Hannah Arendt, the German political philosopher devoted her life's work to the study of totalitarianism. Karl Jaspers, the great existentialist philosopher fought tooth and nail against the pledge of loyalty to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. More academicians should become critical researchers especially in a country such as Malaysia; one that is moving towards worsening totalitarianism especially in its public universities.

Politicians who warned academicians against producing critical studies do not have a place in the intellectual development of any nation. These politicians do not have a sense of what research is about as well as the limitations of doing research. They may not have even heard of traditions in research, let alone comprehend the complexities of designing methodologies to study phenomena.

These politicians should refute intelligently all these research findings so that we can create bodies of alternative knowledge in looking at Malaysia as a phenomena in multiculturalism.
We are also sending an unintelligent message to our students. We are further doing injustice to our pledge to create “world-class research universities" when our academicians are now going to be very careful in reporting research findings.

Dispute findings, not intimidate academicians

Nations will only progress when ruled by scholar-politicians who encourage the free flow of ideas and total freedom in their academic institutions. Totalitarian regimes thrive on the institutionalisation of fear when intelligent ideas are bankrupt.

We are allowing the ideology of bebalisma, as the great thinker of the Eastern world Syed Hussein Al Attas, would call it, to paradigm our intellectual ethos of the day.

Suspension of students who speak up for social justice, harassment of students during campus elections, demotion or dismissal of academicians who refuse to kowtow to totalitarian practices, refusal to repeal acts that shackle freedom of thought and expression, appointment of nay-sayers as educational leaders, and the characterisation of good research findings as "rubbish". "dangerous", "controversial" – these are the symptoms of the intellectual cancer the Malaysian academia is plagued with.

How do we steer academicians away from this road to academic serfdom?

Like the Nobel Laureate Black poet Langston Hughes would say, must we let the academician's dream of intellectual freedom "fester … like a raisin in the sun" or do we "let it… explode"?
Stop this rot - this nation needs amputation.