Why Malaysian universities must learn to learn

When a system rewards quantity over quality, it cultivates a culture of cutting corners.

From Shamyl Shalyzad Shamsuddin

Something is quietly unravelling in Malaysia’s public universities. Behind the polished facades and impressive rise in rankings, a deeper malaise festers – one rarely discussed openly, yet is widely known.

Our ivory towers, once symbols of enlightenment and the pursuit of truth, risk becoming monuments to mediocrity and institutional silence.

The evidence is troubling. Academic dishonesty among lecturers, not just students, has become disturbingly normalised. Citation stacking, paper mills, and the coercion of junior academics to add senior names to publications they never contributed to – these are not isolated incidents, but systemic practices driven by relentless pressures of key performance indicators.

When a system rewards quantity over quality, it cultivates a culture of cutting corners. The pursuit of truth, a university’s sacred mission, gets sacrificed at the altar of metrics.

Then there is the ranking obsession. Malaysian universities pour enormous resources into chasing global rankings, European and American inventions that measure prestige more than genuine educational quality.

We game the system while the real work of developing critical minds takes a backseat. Meanwhile, many Western institutions are opting out of these rankings altogether, recognising their limitations.

Perhaps most damaging is the pervasive culture of fear and silence. Academics who speak up risk being sidelined, passed over for promotion or placed in cold storage.

In environments where juniors cannot question seniors and calling out misconduct invites retaliation, dishonesty thrives unchecked. Without the freedom to speak candidly, organisations cannot learn, adapt, or honestly confront their failures.

Becoming a learning organisation

The path forward requires integrating two powerful frameworks: Watkins and Marsick’s learning organisation model, and the concept of psychological safety. Together, they offer a comprehensive approach to addressing these interconnected problems.

A learning organisation continuously acquires and transfers knowledge, while adapting its behaviour to reflect new insights (Watkins & Marsick, 1997). To combat academic dishonesty, inquiry and dialogue must shift focus from quantity to quality.

Regular ethics forums become spaces for collective learning, rather than policing. Strategic leadership requires vice-chancellors to model ethical behaviour and publicly champion integrity. When leadership visibly values quality over metrics, this message cascades throughout the institution.

To reform KPI-driven culture, embedded systems must be redesigned to capture genuine indicators of learning and impact – mentorship quality, research influence over time, community engagement – rather than merely counting publications.

Critically, empowerment means faculty should develop performance metrics, rather than having them imposed top-down. When academics own the vision for quality scholarship, they pursue it authentically.

To break the culture of silence, continuous learning should equip academics with skills in governance, ethics and constructive advocacy.

Team learning enables departments to act collectively, rather than as individuals standing alone, creating safety in numbers and distributed risk.

System connection links universities with advocacy groups, international academic communities and civil society, providing external validation and platforms for issues that cannot be raised internally.

Building psychological safety

Learning organisations cannot flourish without psychological safety – the shared belief that one will not be punished for speaking up (Edmondson, 1999).

It identifies four progressive stages essential for transformation. Inclusion safety ensures academics feel they belong regardless of their views. Learner safety allows questioning without shame: when academics can admit they don’t know something or report that research isn’t yielding expected results, they focus on genuine inquiry rather than fear of failure. Contributor safety ensures ideas are valued and heard. Finally, challenger safety permits direct confrontation of problems: establishing protected channels for reporting concerns and ensuring whistleblowers face no retaliation.

In Malaysian higher education where hierarchical traditions and face-saving dominate, building challenger safety requires deliberate strategies.

Senior academics must lower the risk for younger colleagues by speaking first on difficult issues, creating precedents for dissent. When entire departments collectively reject unreasonable KPIs, they exercise challenger safety as a group.

At an institutional level, Malaysian universities need the safety to challenge the rankings paradigm itself – building coalitions regionally and globally while developing alternative quality indicators.

The way forward

The main aim of the university is the pursuit of truth – a mission requiring spaces for debate, critical thinking and exploration of diverse perspectives. Yet truth-seeking is inherently risky. It challenges established beliefs, powerful interests and comfortable assumptions. Only with strong psychological safety can academics undertake this mission fearlessly.

Malaysian universities stand at a crossroads. They can continue down the path of metrics-gaming, silence and mediocrity, or embrace the difficult but rewarding journey towards becoming genuine learning organisations where psychological safety enables the fearless pursuit of knowledge.

The choice will determine not only the future of these institutions but also their contribution to Malaysia’s development. The clock is ticking, and the cost of silence grows steeper by the day. - FMT

Shamyl Shalyzad Shamsuddin is a freelance social science researcher and writer based in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan. He specialises in organisational learning and human resource development.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.