By Professor Dr. Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi

With reference to a recent report in a news media about a public university lecturer being pressured to resign because he had taken students for a study field trip to a DAP headquarters, I wish to make a few reminders to Malaysians, university students, academics and university administrators. The question I will dwell on is who actually is the university for? Is the university built and run for the sake of students? Or is the university for lecturers doing research? Or is it for university administrators to feel superior and act with unfettered authority? 

In Malaysia, public university has many 'diseases'…and I am not talking about COVID-19, Cholera, Dengue or any other simple biological diseases. No, I am talking about the disease of perception and attitude. After 27 years working at a public university, I have come to understand fully the various kinds of diseases that plagues our universities. So, before answering the question that is the topic of this article, let me elucidate one of the many diseases of the university. One disease is the feudal culture that exist in the university which I would call 'academic feudalism'. This disease places the administrators of the university as a powerful entity that can do literally what they want.

Malaysians must understand that a university is a place of knowledge and thus, ideally, its administration is by peer consultation. Posts such as the Human Resource or Registrar is supposed to be the servant to the acts of mutual consultation between peers of professors, academics and at times also would and could include matured students.

The university Senate committee is that highest form of mutual consultation and debates as well as a platform of sharing. The Board of Governance is a place where an alternate 'power' exists in case the Senate gets corrupted by illusions of grandeur or power.

The Board of Governors is also a place of reminder that the university serves the people and not the self interest of the academics personally. This is the ideal state of things but post AUKU brought absolute feudalism to public universities that creates an elite administrative 'cluster' of self-interested individuals willingly tying itself to the more vested interest of party politics of the ruling coalition.

Public universities in Malaysia have been entrenched with this feudal mindset of its own creation to the point that the public may notice that nothing controversial is permitted to be discussed in the universities except Christian bashing seminars, LGBT bashing seminars and a congress that isolates all 39 ethnic Malaysians from the one Malay ethnic group.

This academic feudalism produces a culture of narrow minded thinking and restricted discourse that is akin to a narrowing of arteries that chokes off life giving blood to the heart of the university…which is the spirit of critical questioning and more questioning.

I have always and still do begin my lectures to students by saying that the university is the place of structuring information and a place of questions. Universities do not provide 'answers' but critical response of structured thoughts that can be turned into operationalized actions. Universities are not the place of 'truths' but a search for the elusive TRUTH till the end of time.

There are no truth in knowledge but perceptions and thoughts about it. That is why questioning inherited 'truth' of culture, politics, religion and science is the prime objective. But public universities in Malaysia seems to relish on defining borders and limitations of knowledge.

Thus, the DAP version of Malaysia's history and economic formulas are disallowed, Lee Kuan Yew's version of 1965 is 'unacceptable' narrative and Singapore's success story is 'rejected' on the grounds of racism, bigotry and any other thing you can think of. Only one race's version is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I always tell my PhD students that if you ever discover the truth, then you should elevate yourself to Godhood and professorship and have no need to debate and present papers in seminars and conferences or write in journals.

The university is for any persons who wish to discover for him or herself a version of truth that he or she needs to construct and deconstruct by himself or herself. Frank Lloyd Wright, the most famous architect in the world, once criticized the Vice Chancellors of American universities against their acts of 'conditioning knowledge' and not teaching 'enlightenment' at the universities where there is the 'universe' of thoughts, ideas, perceptions and structured information and experience.

The university needs a student hungry to learn about himself, where he stands in his community, his nation, his global niche and how he can contribute for the sustainability of life, liberty and enlightened existence. The university is not the place to get an office job or to curry favor with the Prime Minister of the day. The academic that is valued in a university is one who becomes the bridge between the past, the present and the future.

The academic proposes several roads for the students to take that he or she himself or herself is even yet to discover. The academic proposes a structure of the world and builds a bridge into the unknown world of the future. It is the academics who awards both the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. The university administrators do not teach nor supervise the students towards their birth of enlightenment. The administrators have no business telling academics what they can or cannot teach or whom they should direct students to visit. Pergi balik-lah! 

The administrators are servants to both students and the academics. Anything more than that, the administrators are either a useless entity, a wasteful organization or worse, a destroyer of the futures of a nation. As with any democratic nation, the people are the owners of the country with the civil service and the Members of Legislatures as servants. In the university, the students and academics are kings while the administrators are the stage backdrops that should never outshine the two main actors.

(Professor Dr. Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor at a local university.)