The crisis that our universities face today is an intellectual one within a moral context. We are facing the degradation of our institutions and a debasement of learning. The main reason is because academia has suffered a loss of interdisciplinary exchange. This has led to low standards of scholarship and teaching. This is very apparent in Malaysia, but it is a growing trend globally.
What is criminal is that this paradigm shift has been rationalised as necessary. It has also been advertised as a good sign of progress. It has been hailed as inevitable, in our search for relevance in the name of market forces.
In the process, the loss of academic freedom grows exponentially. Together with this decline, we are losing the institution of the university itself, a vital space for intellectual and creative discourse.
In Malaysia, the raison d’etre for our universities is at stake. Academics are not concerned that future generations will suffer. They will read about the once-flourishing concept of universities of their past, our present. They will quickly realise how we, their parents, teachers, professors and leaders, destroyed it in a blink of an eye.
The traditional university became a factory of information packaging. What used to be a space for discursive engagement or a search for knowledge, has now become an impassioned assembly line of marketable products. These products are the human academics and the graduates we produce. But they might as well be soulless containers, piles of styrofoam receptacles.
This decline is reflected in the subjects we teach. In economics for example, we have moved from EP Thompson’s moral economy to Adam Smith’s political economy. Currently, we extoll technical training and measurement metrics.
Could this be the criminal oversight of Wawasan 2020? In retrospect it was a blinkered vision with a calculated and uninformed agenda. It has ruined education for Malaysia.
Universities or fancy buildings with central air-con?
More courses today lack the theoretical, empirical and methodological rigour that defined great universities of the past. Furthermore, these great universities exist outside Malaysia. I can only think of one or two in Malaysia’s past. The rest are fancy buildings with central air conditioning.
Our master’s-level students find it difficult to define a “problem statement”, something so basic. They are clueless about the purpose of their research, yet they yearn for that piece of paper. Some pretend to thirst for knowledge and lecturers pretend to be excited. How do I know it is pretence? Because nobody “goes the extra mile” any more.
Never mind reading books – or even one book. Reading the first three pages of a 20-page journal article is the order of the day. Sometimes, the abstract of 250 words suffices. And of course, there is rampant plagiarism, a regular activity of both lecturer and student. This is how scholarship in Malaysian universities has progressed.
As for the lecturers? The lack of direction and incompetence has become the norm. When lecturers themselves struggle to ask fundamental questions about what interests them in their research, you can forget about imparting the basics to their students.
Universities are consumed by unrestrained market dominance. The old paradigm in scholarship was the search for a connection between politics, culture, economics, the arts, history and society. This has faded. The consequence is that the public sphere has become a space of anti-intellectualism.
The public sphere is a shared intellectual space of people. They are supposed to be free to participate in it and change their circumstances for the better. The purpose is to be able to imagine a better, soulful and moral future.
Inconvenient facts are never mentioned
Today, more of us are feeling morally challenged. Should we drift back to the old paradigm or be peer-pressured into being part of the anti-scholarship consensus? This is the basis of academic freedom, the fact that the few true scholars and intellectuals have to constantly battle this pressure because we want to be human, soulful and moral.
Do we not want to be emancipated, where the human can flourish? Or are we ignorantly content to be one with consensus? Malaysians today are content with short-term materialistic goals. This is the dehumanising consensus that our universities and society encourages.
Max Weber, a 19th century German sociologist and historian once said: “The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognise inconvenient facts.” In Malaysian universities, we definitely teach facts.
However, the inconvenient facts are never mentioned. Mentioning them may threaten lecturers’ promotion or that coveted administrative position. Short-term gains are valued over long-term progress. It is terribly selfish and immoral.
Vice-chancellors who are CEOs, not scholars
Along with conformity, universities and academics are masters of bureaucracy. Technocratic rationality has succeeded in suppressing intellectual reason. It is obvious in the slew of irrational decisions our leadership has made over the decades. It is also evident in the nonsensical publications our academics produce.
These irrational decisions are motivated by the rush to incorporate technological advances into society. Technology and industry have become the dominant controlling force in our economy. It has sidelined intellectual pursuits and mulling over human problems.
These developments challenge the original purpose of the university. Academic courses are viewed as economic units. No longer are they considered modules to develop the human soul. Courses are now viewed as quantitative outputs. The high quality of the courses and the standards of academic excellence have disappeared.
Many university vice-chancellors (VCs) now refer to themselves as CEOs of enterprises rather than scholars. In the past, their responsibility was to defend the intellectual life of their institutions and scholars. Former Universiti Malaya VC Syed Hussein Alatas did this and paid dearly for it.
Subjects in the Arts and Humanities are considered useless today. They are not seen as utilitarian, or market driven. By contrast, there has been an exponential increase in business courses.
Suppressing the citizen
Too many universities now project an identity of what they truly are — profit-motivated companies. This reflects the skewed market orientation of the Malaysian university and education system.
Will the traditional university become a tourist attraction of the future? Similar to the monuments left by ancient civilisations which we visit and take photographs of while on vacation?
Academic freedom and the pursuit of scholarship are not trivial matters. It is wrong to think that they remain at the fringes of society. It is not merely a matter for academic discussion among disgruntled lecturers.
The suppression of academic freedom is the suppression of citizens. To control thinking and prevent the sharing of ideas diminishes morale. To suppress creative debate is to dumb down society. And the greatest sin is when universities consciously participate.
By Sharifah Munirah Alatas / Free Malaysia Today
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of AsiaWeReview.
