Don’t get soaked in alien ideas, scholars told

An academic association complains that local researchers are reluctant to venture into uncharted territories.

The Malaysian Academic Movement says academic research in Malaysia is conducted primarily to fulfil publication targets. (File pic)

PETALING JAYA: The Malaysian Academic Movement (Gerak) has criticised the tendency among local scholars to blindly adopt Western ideas.

Speaking to FMT, Gerak chairman Zaharom Nain said intellectual imperialism had caused research in the social sciences and humanities to suffer by encouraging researchers to focus on safe areas because there would be easy funding and an instant market.

The term “intellectual imperialism” was recently used by sociologist Syed Farid Alatas when, in an interview with FMT, he complained of the poor quality of local academic journals.

Alatas, a professor at the National University of Singapore, called for efforts to promote high standards in local Malay-language academic publishing.

Zaharom complained that academic research in Malaysia was conducted primarily to fulfil publication targets.

“Such a tendency,” he said, “results in research that is repetitive and unchallenging, the kind that utilises status-quo-oriented theories and models. At their worst, such works are descriptive and not evaluative.

“Hence, we have very little taken up that is path-breaking and that ventures into uncharted research territories.”

He said the problem in the humanities and social sciences was not necessarily the borrowing of ideas from the West or elsewhere, but the blind adoption of them.

“Much of Malaysian social science is peppered with these cases of blind adoption and also the deliberate use and application of theoretical frameworks that uphold the status quo. Hence the mediocrity of such work.”

He urged local academics to take theories from other countries with a critical mind so that they could avoid being too dependent on them.

“We must adopt a nuanced approach and remember that there are theories from the West that liberate and there are those that reinforce and legitimise controls,” he said.

He claimed it was this intellectual imperialism that had created the dominant strand of thinking that assumes that education is primarily about preparing human beings for the work force. This was especially prevalent in higher education, he added.

“Such a utilitarian approach limits academic enterprise and adventure. And, really, we are not – or should not be – producing semi-skilled and unthinking graduates for the market, but developing potentially gifted and progressive human beings to advance society in so many different ways.” -FMT