Keep politics out of higher education, say academics

 

An academic says more needs to be done before Malaysia’s graduates can compete globally. (Bernama pic)

PETALING JAYA: Academics say the higher education sector must be separated from partisan politics in order to move forward and produce better quality lecturers and graduates.

Former academic Andrew Aeria said more needed to be done before the country’s graduates were able to compete globally.

“We are in a hole as far as higher education is concerned. We need to seriously stop digging, we need to separate partisan politics from the serious politics of getting our higher education system and priorities right,” he said at an online conference yesterday.

He also said while university statutes existed, most university academics had little to no knowledge of these statutes which outline the responsibilities of all university officers and bodies.

Andrew Aeria.

Many administrators also tended to ignore the statutes and failed to abide by them, he said.

“Along with a poor understanding of what academic scholarship means, this has led many university administrators to act in an authoritarian fashion,” he said, adding that it included little consultation with staff on the appointment of deans and directors.

“Nowadays, senate and faculty meetings are not as important, they have become talk shops for top-down information sharing and directive implementation.”

He also suggested that the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) was unsustainable, as more students were being forced into a system of debt.

“The financing of higher education is currently via block grants of university operational expenses and PTPTN loans to students, thus, the operating costs of universities are heavily subsidised.

“But students today are pushed to take large loans to finance their education and the irony is that many of our university graduates earn low wages, or worse, remain unemployed and are even unemployable.

“How then do we achieve academic excellence when a large number of our graduates end up deeper in debt after they graduate?”

Lieutenant-colonel (Rtd) Ahmad Ghazali Abu Hassan, a former professor at Universiti Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia, said some universities were ineffective in terms of their achievement and economically wasteful.

One of the most glaring shortcomings of the current education system was the poor command of the English language among lecturers, as well as their limited capacity to express ideas and comprehend the available resources in their respective subjects.

He said this in turn has caused students to lack motivation and appreciation for the education opportunities presented to them. - FMT