Why political activism is good for students: on Malaysia's UUCA resolution, Part 2

"Continuing crises"

The continuing criminalisation of the human intellect is setting the stage for another wave of crisis, even as we transfer the incompetent former key educational leaders to other departments so that he/she may put his/her philosophy of human liberation to better use. All these will continue as we trumpet internationally how great our higher education system is. We will do so to those who do not know better; to those from others nations who send in their children to learn what academic freedom means. Are they instead learning about totalitarianism and how to transplant this system in their own country?

Will the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education save us from the rot? What will it take to make a hundred flowers bloom, when we have yet a hundred thorns to weed out? Or is the ministry set up to also tighten the chains with which we are still bound? I do not think this is the case since education is about "drawing out the potentials within".

This is the dilemma of our intellectual growth, as we continue to demand for radical changes to rakyat-owned public universities. The academic union of each university has failed to save their institutions from being continuously shackled by those who do not know what a university means or fail to acknowledge its philosophical mission.The students and faculty, intellectually harassed and terrorised, are getting fed up with the idea that universities are places to only study till their eyes pop, get good grades, sign the pledge of loyalty, and serve the powers that are increasingly becoming corrupt, authoritarian, and plagued with abject intellectual poverty.

"Engineer regime change"

Intellectuals must disengage themselves from any regimes of truth of the day in order to be paragons of virtue, to be respected, and to help dispel a post-modern “myth of the lazy native”, borrowing the words of Malaysian thinker and student of colonialism, Syed Hussein Al Attas. If we are to become ‘Harvards of the East’, there are fundamental notion of progress we must embrace. If we are to call our universities ‘world class’ universities, we must groom our intellectuals to develop dissenting views and never afraid to speak up so that they may help society reconstruct and regenerate. Is not the role of the academician, one of a Socrates-like scholar that will provide more questions and fewer answers and one who applies scholarship to social reconstructionism?

No one should claim ownership of the minds of the children we are educating, not even the most committed of all academicians. The children are to be cultivated as thinking and feeling beings if we are to teach them how to design a more tolerant, ethical, and less-corrupt society. Of course, the hands of creativity must be held by altruism and ethics.Democracy must be made a lived experience, not lip-service. It must begin in the corridors of academia.

Socrates, Rousseau, Marx, Dewey, Montessori, Froebel, and Freire all fought tooth and nail for the schooled mind to be free. Al Farabi, Al Arabi, Al Rushd, Radhakrishna, Kung Fu Tze, and Lao Tzu were fierce defenders of truth.

How do we academicians engineer a regime change in universities if the philosophy that governs these noble institutions is no longer close to our heart's desire and the intellectual force to which we are attracted? How do we use our simplicity to revolt against the complexity of an increasingly corrupt social order? How do we wish to be governed as academic beings or homo academicus; the academician whose pursuit is not of wealth, power, and connectivity to the broadband of the wealth-power keg or to alliances we still find suspicious; or to theocratic truths-forces; or to some ethnically based doctrines, or even to blind internationalism that is sucking nation-states into its empire?

Ultimately, we cannot continue to turn each child into another brick in the wall: