That fuzzy thing called ‘academic culture’ – something Malaysia’s universities have lost

For me, the academic culture entails three processes.

First, we must feel excited to search for knowledge and Truth and to pursue excellence. Dare to ask: Why? How come? How do you explain?

Understand that the search for Truth comes with the pursuit of excellence. And further, that the operations and function of the university must be defined by the pursuit of excellence.

If the university does not pursue excellence, where else can one pursue it, and how else can one pass it on in any society? After all, if one desires excellence in government administration, in the learning and teaching processes in schools, in industry, indeed in the performance of politicians, the pursuit of excellence must start at the university.

The second aspect of academic culture is the transmission of knowledge and excellence to younger people, be they younger students or junior colleagues. This means investing in research and publishing, again and again. The academician must also develop and practise a strict sense of integrity and not resort to plagiarism. Or AI or ChatGPT. This cannot be taught. It has to be cultivated, and then transmitted to younger colleagues and students by example.

The third aspect of this academic culture is the belief that academicians have a special place in society and contribute towards the betterment of the community, the nation, perhaps the world. This attitude might appear pretentious today, but from the vantage point of the 1950s and 1960s – when local intellectuals played leading roles in combating colonialism, striving for independence or Merdeka, and launching nation-building agendas – these are not far-fetched ambitions.

The early-day academics linked the university back to society, out there. Academic culture was not stuck in an ivory tower. It was further understood that this commitment was a lifelong endeavour, not something that could be achieved quickly, let alone in slipshod fashion.

Distractions over admission irregularities

About two months ago, we witnessed the annual anxieties related to school exam results, followed by announcements of admission or rejection into the public universities.

As usual, we heard about how certain deserving students didn’t get a chance to pursue their dream courses in medicine, law and accountancy. They had failed to gain admission despite their excellent academic results. From their perspective, the ethnic quota system discriminated against them.

Officials were quick to clarify they had done away with ethnic quotas since 2002. All those offered places deserved entrance because the entire process of determining entrance was “based on merit”, they said. No one faced discrimination; there were simply not enough places for all.

In fact, there are at least two ways to qualify for entrance to public universities.

Admissions could be based on one’s results in the more stringent STPM or Year 13 exams, which was the case for the vast majority of ethnic minority applicants.

Or, one could gain entry via a good performance in the matriculation or “asasi” foundation course, which is conducted by “approved colleges”. This is the case for most bumiputra students. These results determine 90% of the points one accumulates. The remaining 10% of points are derived from co-curriculum activities and involvement in school uniformed units.

Perhaps it is less well-known that there is a third way to gain entry into Malaysia’s public universities. One can opt to be a full fee-paying student to ensure entrance into the course of one’s choice. Initially, this was an option made available only to foreign students. It was a way for public universities to top up their funding since the constant complaint was that the government had not provided them with enough funds.

Reportedly, the enrolment of foreign students in the top five research universities has grown by 20–30% per year since 2018. Professor Naim Hilman, a former vice-chancellor of UUM revealed that 8.7% or 53,322 students out of a total enrolment of 611,698 students, across 20 public universities, are foreign students.

Accordingly, the number of subsidised places under the centralised university admissions processing system (UPU) has been reduced. To ensure they can gain admission into their desired courses, especially medicine, dentistry, law and engineering, local students, including top students, have had to use the commercial admission channels, paying the same fees as foreigners.

Imagine, this year the University of Malaya medicine programme awarded only one out of 120 UPU seats to an STPM student. On the other hand, all the bumiputra students accepted onto the same course did so through their matriculation course results.

To ensure acceptance into this course, which reportedly costs as much as half a million ringgit in total for five years (still cheaper than if one pursued the same course in a private university like the International Medical University or the Manipal-Melaka Medical University, locally), parents and students have opted for the “commercial channel”. 

The anxiety and frustration among applicants and their parents is due to the lack of transparency in admissions data. We do not know how many places of the various channel types are available. Still less do we know who got admitted and from which stream.

So, public distrust bubbled to the fore. It is claimed that the ethnic quotas have no longer been used since 2002. But then, we have replaced them with quotas for different channels – STPM, matriculation, commercial channels for locals, and commercial channels for foreigners!

In its 19 September statement, G25 called upon the government to increase the number of subsidised UPU seats so that capable Malaysians are not squeezed out. Also, the commercial direct intake programmes must be capped and their revenue channelled back into creating more subsidised places.

Finally, G25 called on the government to increase funding for education so that universities can focus on research, quality teaching and the production of top-rate graduates. Without urgent reform, the group declares: “We risk creating a system where access depends not on merit, but on one’s ability to pay.”

In the same vein, Dr Sharifah Munirah Alatas, the president of the academic movement Gerak, urged the government to “enrich varsity culture, not chase foreign student numbers”.

Indeed, the public universities in Malaysia should not be bogged down by such distractions in the first instance. There is truly a more serious problem to attend to. We have witnessed a gradual but noticeable erosion in standards and the overall quality of the public universities, their faculty and their students.

For me, this has to do with the withering away of this fuzzy thing called academic culture. In the rest of this article, I discuss this problem. It will draw on my own participation in and observation of our public universities, particularly Universiti Sains Malaysia, where I taught from 1979 to 2012.

The first academicians – a mission

The first generation of Malaysian academics comprised outstanding people such as Prof Syed Hussein Alatas, Prof Syed Husin Ali, Prof Ungku Aziz, Tunku Shamshul Bahrin, Prof KJ Ratnam, Prof Wang Gungwu, Prof Kernail Singh Sandhu and Prof Hamzah Sendut.

My friends (like Khoo Khay Jin, KS Jomo, Abdul Rahman Embong, Lim Teck Ghee, Ishak Shaari and Johan Saravanamuttu) and I were the second generation. All of us spent some part of our training overseas. Not surprisingly, we were influenced by the turbulence in the West in the 1960s and 1970s – the peace movement, the student protests, and the civil rights and counter-culture movements. These movements affected us and prompted us to engage with problems and issues in our own country.

We also witnessed the worsening of ethnic relations, the harsh repression of student protests in 1974 and its aftermath, and the awakening of a new middle class who were forming new cause-oriented NGOs.

We pondered these issues – overseas and after we returned home. We thought we might help ease the tensions, blunt the polarisation and improve things.

We were actually excited about becoming academicians! It was almost like a calling. A mission. A challenge and responsibility. We were not politicians, nor business people, nor religious teachers. But we believed we had an important role to play.

Three quests

There were three things we were excited about: the search for knowledge, the transmission of that knowledge to others, and service to the people.

First, we were excited that we were on this search for knowledge and Truth and pursuing excellence. We were keen to keep abreast of goings-on at home and overseas and equally eager to challenge and debate the ‘given wisdom’.

Yes, our generation loved to ask why, how come, and how do you explain this. (Like the character, the Why Bird in Sesame Street, or like Socrates, the gadfly in the Greek classics, or like Sang Kancil, the mousedeer, in local Malay folklore.).We wanted to distinguish between Truth and falsehood, but also between Truth and half-truths. And we were prepared to work hard and to strive for the whole Truth. The pathway to this was the pursuit of excellence. For us, Truth, knowledge and excellence came together.

The university must be about excellence. If the university does not instill excellence, where would anyone instil it in society? If you want excellence in administration, among the youth in the schools, in industry and the professions – say, medicine, engineering and architecture – or in the performance of politicians, you must start in the university.

Second, we were equally concerned with transmitting that knowledge-excellence to younger people, be they our students and younger colleagues, effectively and efficiently. I remember we spent long hours preparing our lectures. We were challenged to make our students excited about learning, and to be creative and critical. So, we taught them to ask the same questions that we asked. We were also concerned about the students comparing us to our senior colleagues, who were role models for us.

Transmitting that knowledge and excellence also meant we would do the necessary research, writing and publishing, apart from teaching. Unlike other professions, academics are very much our own bosses. We have to be motivated individually – to read and to reflect constantly, to conduct thoroughgoing research, and then to publish in competitive journals, in order to disseminate that new knowledge we have uncovered. There was no room for cutting corners, cheating and plagiarism. That’s not how you pursue the Truth and excellence.

This pursuit of knowledge and excellence cannot be taught. It has to be cultivated over a lifetime, and then transmitted to younger colleagues and students by example.

For my generation, part of this endeavour to transmit that knowledge involved learning and mastering Malay to a certain standard. Most of us, including ethnic Malay colleagues, had attended English-medium schools and studied overseas. So, our command of Malay was not up to scratch.

We took tuition classes, enrolled for the SPM (Year 11 exams) Malay language paper, and prepared for the exams like most young students – for we were required to pass with a credit grade, in order to be confirmed in any civil service post.

In USM, we also had to enrol for a year-long Malay course, ostensibly to improve our command of the language. At the end of the course, they tested our spoken and written Malay and our ability to deliver a competent lecture.

It was only after we had achieved a credit in Malay in SPM and been awarded a USM certificate for Malay that we could be confirmed in our positions. Once confirmed, we were allowed to apply for a government loan to buy a car, apply for research grants, attend conferences abroad and be considered for promotion subsequently. So, the certificate was a key document, like a surat tauliah (letter of credentials). Some of us pasted it on our office doors, only half in jest.

Third, there was a common understanding among our generation of lecturers that the excellence we were pursuing, and the knowledge we would accumulate, should be used to make the community, the nation, perhaps the world, a better place.

Looking back at the 1980s, you might say that was very pretentious of us. But intellectuals in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s had led their countries to independence, launched revolutions against and defeated the imperialists. They had deliberated ambitious nation-building agendas, engaged with the so-called ‘Brave New World’, and so on. That was our mindset then, 40 years ago.

My point, simply, is that our early generation of academicians linked the university back to society out there. We looked beyond the ivory tower. We also understood that one’s impact on society does not occur overnight. It takes time, a long time.

So, ideally, this inclination to make the world and society a better place becomes a lifelong endeavour. Nor can it be achieved through individual effort. All fellow academicians should be striving to serve society, the community, the nation together.

I recall vividly we looked forward to the one-day-long “state of the nation” workshops we used to organise in USM in the early 1980s, jointly organised by the schools of humanities and social sciences. On that occasion, academics would give presentations on the state of the economy, the state of society – especially regarding ethnic relations – and the state of politics. The presenters prepared themselves substantially because the most senior and junior members would grill them. These one-day workshops were important occasions to hone our academic prowess. They certainly contributed to the making of the academic culture.

So, what happens when you pull together these three concerns:

• The search for knowledge and Truth and the pursuit of excellence
• The transmission of that knowledge and the pursuit of excellence to one’s students and to younger colleagues
• The use of that knowledge and excellence to leave a positive impact on society, the nation and the world?

We get that fuzzy thing called ‘academic culture’.

Common trait and pursuit

Early generations of academics in Malaysia embraced the academic culture. This framed how the universities – the administration, faculty and students, regardless of whether one was a scientist or a non-scientist, regardless of one’s ethno-religious background – operated, or at least ought to operate, daily from the late 1950s until perhaps the late 1980s.  

During this period, society had a high regard for academics. We didn’t encounter ‘kangkong professors’ or ‘half-past-six professors’ in those early days. No academician was talking about how our ancestors had the ability to fly in ancient times! Our social standing among the politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists, businesspeople and professionals – doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers – was comparable if not higher.

On our part, many of us regarded the role of the academician as an important – perhaps the most important – role in society, especially in a newly independent nation-state. After all, we were helping to prepare the next generation, instilling in them the pursuit of knowledge, Truth and excellence that would determine the failure or success of the nation.

(There was even a popular but misguided impression that academics were not very concerned about financial gain. This was only true to some extent when I started teaching in 1979. However, the cost of things – housing, cars, children’s education, travel, entertainment, leisure and food – rose from the mid-1980s.

Accordingly, the salaries of the engineers, architects, doctors, executives – including our former students employed in the private sector – were raised. It was with great envy that these presumably altruistic academicians viewed this unfairness.

So, academicians too began to demand – and were finally awarded a salary revision. That said, the financial package we were offered and have been offered since has lagged far behind the remuneration package awarded to those in the professions – unlike, say, for our counterparts in the island republic next door.)

In the event, what distinguished the first and second, and perhaps most of the third generation of academicians in Malaysia, from later hires – especially those recruited after 2000 – is that the early generations subscribed to the academic culture.

The latter, coming after the third generation, did not subscribe to this culture, I dare say. What happened between the first three and the later generations was the rapid ‘massification’ of higher learning in Malaysia.

Privatisation and ‘massification’

In 1980, there were only five public universities in Malaysia. By 1990, there were nine, and by 2013, there were 20. The five oldest ones were accorded “research university” status, allocated more funds, and encouraged to develop their post-graduate programmes.

Apart from these, another 32 polytechnics and 84 community colleges – in keeping with the turn to technical and vocational education and training – were established by 2013.

However, unexpected developments in the UK and Australia, two countries that traditionally catered to Malaysians wishing to study overseas, prompted this expansion process to be sped up. Under then-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British universities suddenly charged foreign students more than double the original fees. Australia adopted Thatcher’s initiative too. The result: most parents in Malaysia could no longer afford to finance their children’s overseas studies.

Pressured by this development, the Malaysian government ultimately resolved the problem by privatising and corporatising the higher education sector.

The passing of the Private Higher Educational Institutions Act 1996 and two other related pieces of legislation facilitated this major shift in educational policy. For the first time, the government issued licenses to private concerns to establish universities and colleges in Malaysia. It awarded a first round of licences to establish universities to government-linked firms like the national petroleum company Petronas, the telecoms giant Telekom and the power producer Tenaga.

In the next phase, licenses were given to a few Barisan Nasional parties, which teamed up with businesses to build universities. These universities were:

• Tunku Abdul Rahman University (Utar), owned and controlled by the MCA
• Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology (Aimst) owned and controlled by the MIC
• Wawasan Open University, owned and controlled by Gerakan

Presumably, the efforts of the MCA, the MIC and Gerakan complemented Umno’s control of public sector educational institutions and served as systems of patronage to their party members and supporters.

A third round saw licences awarded to a select group of foreign universities that had become popular with students from Malaysia. These foreign universities established branch campuses in Malaysia. Among them were Australia’s Monash, Curtin and Swinburne universities; the UK’s Nottingham, Newcastle and Herriot-Watt universities; and Xiamen University from Fujian, China.

A fourth group comprised private university colleges that “twinned” with foreign universities. They were licensed to prepare students for degrees offered by their foreign partners. Usually, the students spent a year’s study in the foreign campus, after a couple of years in the Malaysian campus.

In 1995, there was not a single private university. By 2001, 16 had been licensed and by 2013, 47 private universities and university colleges had been established. Another 390 private colleges had been registered. Most ran courses that offered certificates and diplomas, not necessarily degree programmes.

As a result, enrolments in tertiary education exploded. The total numbers in public and private institutions rose from 170,000 in 1985, to 230,000 in 1990, to 550,000 in 1999, to 1.3 million in 2012.

The increases have been dramatic at private universities and colleges, whose share of the total has climbed from 8.9% in 1985 to 39.1% in 1990 to 35% in 2012.

Notably, female students outnumber male students. The female to male ratio is 55:45 overall, but it soars to 60:40 in public universities and colleges. These numbers include a growing number of foreign students (40,525 in 2005 rising to 72,500 in 2012) as Malaysia touts itself as a regional centre for higher education.

Establishing additional public universities, promoting technical and vocational education by establishing polytechnics and vocational colleges, and licensing private universities and colleges also made more than enough tertiary education places available to Malaysian youth.

By allowing several of these private universities to offer medical, engineering and law courses, ethnic minority students interested in these courses but who were denied such opportunities due to the ethnic quota system before 2002 could now register for these high-demand courses if they qualified.

These developments resolved a major bone of contention, which had raised the temperature of inter-ethnic relations each year.

New problems

This is not to say that massification of higher education driven by privatisation and rapid expansion of the public sector did not contribute to new kinds of problems. They did.

First, a clear distinction between the public and the private emerged. The vast majority of students enrolled in the public sector were ethnic Malays and other bumiputra students. The vast majority enrolled in the private universities and colleges were ethnic minorities. (In 2005, Malay and other bumiputra enrolment in public universities was 82% of the total enrolled; Chinese 13.2% and Indians 3.1%.) That same year, enrolment of Malays and other bumiputras in polytechnics and community colleges was over 90%. By contrast, only 16.3% of students enrolled for degree courses in the private colleges were Malay and other bumiputras in 1999).

The tuition fees in the private sector were often several times more expensive than in the public sector, principally because the government heavily subsidised the public sector. This high tuition fees in the private sector and the bumiputra quota system in public universities and colleges contributed to the ethnic distinction between the public and the private sectors.

More than that, while Malay was the medium of instruction in the public universities, the private universities and colleges were allowed to teach in English, reversing the decision adopted in 1971 to use Malay at all levels of education.

As a result, many bumiputra students from public universities have a poorer grasp of English than the ethnic minority students from private institutions.

Bumiputra graduates are thus ‘handicapped” when looking for employment in the private sector, as a good grasp of English and other communication skills are considered essential for employment.

Second, private sector institutions are ultimately concerned about their bottom lines and do not want to end up in the red. Apart from a few that offer medicine, engineering and legal degree courses, the others teach matriculation and pre-university courses. So they offer management, accountancy and business studies, mass communications, computer studies and other technical subjects at the diploma and degree levels. A handful offer courses in music and the fine arts (graphic design). The humanities, social sciences and pure sciences are largely neglected. The emphasis appears to be on producing graduates who can readily fit into the job market.

To a large extent, public universities replicated this reorientation of private universities after their corporatisation in the 1990s. They became responsible for maintaining their operating budgets. The federal government still provided capital development grants if their applications were approved. But the public universities had to seek new sources of funding as well.

One of the ways they did this was by increasing student intakes, particularly at the postgraduate level. They designed postgraduate programmes – particularly those that were semi-professional and commercial, rather than purely academic in nature. In particular, they enrolled full-fee paying foreign students. To ensure sufficient enrolment for these courses, entry requirements have not been stringent enough.  

They also made more money by starting “twinning programmes” with local private colleges that couldn’t give out their own degrees. Among the twinning programmes offered are business, computer science and mass communications courses.

Academics at public universities end up preparing teaching modules, supervising and marking assignments and exam scripts for these private colleges on top of their usual teaching duties at their own universities. Of course, additional income and some ‘promotion points’ are awarded to those academics who ‘contribute to the university’ in this way.

But this meant that many academicians have little time left to do research and publish their findings in reputable journals. It also meant falling enrolments in the public universities for the humanities and social sciences – history, philosophy, literature, performing arts, fine arts, anthropology.

That said, student enrolments in Islamic studies rose and new courses were launched. Most public universities recruited more experts in Islamic studies, as they launched new undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Student enrolments, including those from overseas, increased.

The number who specialised in Islamic studies doubled and trebled. Many were government scholars on scholarship, but they struggled to find jobs in the private sector when they graduated.  

A massive bureaucracy was then created to absorb these graduates. This contributed to the ‘bureaucratisation’ of Islam and the secularisation of the Sharia, as Dr Maznah Mohamed has so cogently shown in her 2010 study.

Erosion of academic standards

The rapid ‘massification’ of higher learning led to the lowering of academic standards in several regards.

First, public universities shortened their honours degrees from four to three years, reacting to private universities’ three-year programmes.

Second, due to the presence of more new universities, both private and public, students whose performance didn’t match those previously admitted, say, a decade or two earlier, were now getting admitted.

Most bumiputra students now gained entrance into the public universities, including to the much sought-after medicine, dentistry, law, accountancy courses, through matriculation asasi programmes. Most educators admit these pre-U programmes do not prepare their students as rigorously as the STPM course.

Standards were also lowered for entry into the private universities, though for different reasons. The private universities had to enrol a minimum number of students for them to offset their considerable expenses.

Even more consequential was that too many young or inexperienced new lecturers were recruited to teach in the new public and private universities, and to service the hundreds of university colleges and twinning colleges as well.

No doubt, a small group of senior professors-cum-administrators continued to help operate these new university-colleges and twinning-colleges. However, most of their academic staff were recent graduates themselves. They had little experience in teaching at the university level, and even less experience in conducting research and publishing in reputable journals.

So, two new phenomena took place in university education.

First, unprecedented in Malaysia’s educational history, a problem of graduate unemployment developed! In 2012, about 60,000 graduates, almost all from public universities, could not find jobs. Employers complain that many of these local graduates lack technical expertise and soft skills (communications, other social skills and general knowledge).

To resolve this problem, local universities launched programmes to teach these soft skills to students. Those who had graduated were invited back to ‘intern’ with the universities and some government departments to pick up these soft skills.

Second, young lecturers – the fourth generation of local academicians – are clearly not imbued with that fuzzy thing called academic culture, unlike the first and second-generation academicians.

Worse, this fourth generation had risen to the top too quickly. They took over the existing public universities and the newly established private universities before they could become familiar and imbued with an academic culture, indeed before they had established reputations as sound teachers or researchers.

No doubt, there remained pockets of excellence within any of these universities, among third generation local academicians.

However, it is undeniable that a majority of the fourth generation did not subscribe to the old academic culture, simply due to unfamiliarity with it. Instead, many were easily influenced to replace that old fuzzy culture with a new corporatist cum bureaucratic-Islamic one, especially in the public universities.

Indeed, these days, the public universities seem unable to recruit the best and the brightest – bumiputra or ethnic minority, of any age cohort – to train for academic careers.

Many, especially the minorities, prefer to go into private practice if they are in the professions. Or they join the private sector, rather than invest so much time and effort in furthering their studies to PhD level. They are well aware that public universities offer limited promotion prospects.

Top bumiputra students, even those with degrees from the world’s best universities, shared the same viewpoint. Choosing to enter the corporate world or politics or to set up a private practice prevailed over joining the university for a career as an academician.

Such attitudes affected self-worth of the fourth and fifth-generation academics. No longer did they see themselves as people who could contribute to the betterment of the community, the nation and the world.

We must also mention the impact of the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) on how the universities operate. First introduced in 1971, it was amended to facilitate the Ministry of Education’s control over universities after the 1974 student uprisings.

Much has already been written about how the coercive UUCA has caused a sea change in political attitudes among academic staff and students.

Whereas students used to elect their own student leaders and run their own student unions, which were allowed to manage their own funds, all this is nowadays disallowed. Instead, students have to adhere to strictures and regulations set by an extensive department of students affairs headed by a deputy vice-chancellor.

Significantly, all campuses have been fenced up literally, and considerable security measures introduced to ensure compliance among students with UUCA regulations.

Similarly, the academic staff at all public universities have to abide by various regulations and fulfil various requirements. The sad consequence is that nowadays the majority of the academic staff have withdrawn from engagement in public issues and become cautious about expressing critical opinions.

Coupled with the rise of the corporatist cum bureaucratic-Islamist culture which engulfs the campuses, the result is the slow-death of the critical intellectual tradition which had previously characterised local public universities, especially among the first and second-generation cohort groups.

Rather, under the leadership of the fourth generation, the fourth and fifth generations of local academicians do the usual teaching chores, conduct some research, often some survey on a group basis with their colleagues or with postgraduate students, and they publish in local journals which they might themselves administer.

To get promoted, they accumulate points from performing the usual duties, teaching extra in twining programmes, and taking up petty administrative positions. But they no longer ask the “why”, “how do you explain” and “how come” questions. And they do not talk about pursuing excellence like the earlier generations.

Providers of private tertiary education are even less imbued with that academic culture. In the first place, they employ fewer academics with the necessary qualification to save costs. Academics in private colleges are known to teach more hours than those in the public sector. Often, they have to teach courses in which they have received little training.

Moreover, except for those teaching at Malaysian branch campuses of foreign universities, most academics in private colleges are not granted research leave, let alone research funds. Attempts to set up an academic staff union among those employed in private colleges have been stymied by employers and reportedly, the activists concerned harassed.

In and of itself, privatisation or corporatisation are not necessarily detrimental to academic excellence. In the US, the best universities are private ones where academics are allowed to play major roles in running the universities. Corporatisation can also enhance the competitive spirit and the pursuit of academic excellence too.

In Malaysia, however, corporatisation has led to a reduced role for the senate, which used to be the highest decision-making authority in the university and made up of all professors serving in the universities.

Following corporatisation or privatisation, an inner circle of top executives, appointed by the owners of the universities, make all the decisions over academic and non-academic matters.

Rejuvenate that academic culture

By revisiting my own trajectory, let me summarise the above.

From 1980 to 2012, while at USM, I was self-motivated to keep abreast of developments and debates in the social sciences. I was especially interested in the study of politics in Southeast and East Asia and aspired to become a top scholar in my field. I read a lot, conducted research, wrote and published regularly, and shared my ideas with others.

I also believed in being a responsible teacher. I always went into my lectures and tutorials well prepared. I disliked marking assignments and exam scripts but enjoyed lecturing.

Most fun of all was working with my PhD candidates – they challenged me and excited me during my last decades in USM. I am proud to state that my former PhD students have become responsible researchers and teachers in their own right. I am assured that they are passing that pursuit of knowledge and excellence to their own students, in whichever institution they are in now.

Finally, I have gone out of the ivory tower to engage in society as a scholar-activist or a public intellectual. I did not shy away from speaking truth and knowledge to power, especially as the country started going into a tailspin in so many areas. But that is a topic for another day.

Our early generation of academics were influenced by the student protests of the 1970s. In the same way, we were drawn to take part in various civil society groups and activities during the 1980s.

Ultimately, we must return to the pursuit of excellence and knowledge and Truth in our universities. For if we do not pursue excellence, knowledge and Truth in the universities, where will it occur in Malaysia? We must re-emphasise this need in our study of Malaysia’s economy, politics and society, and in our pursuit of all other subjects.

We have stressed that this excellence, knowledge and Truth must be passed on to younger generations of academics, as well as to our own students.

But it also means we must take our teaching, studying and research responsibilities seriously. We have to be self-motivated and preferably enjoy pursuing these ends.

And finally, we have a responsibility, especially in a developing country, to reach out to the rest of the community and the nation, and even to others globally. We can do our bit to make Malaysia and the world a better place.

Be public intellectuals or scholar-activists or teacher-activists. It follows we must be active in academic associations like the Malaysian Social Science Association (PSSM). Or join a research-cum-educational civil society organisation like Aliran.

Take possession of these organisations, re-invent them. Make a difference. Promote that fuzzy thing called ‘academic culture’.

Francis Loh
Co-editor, Aliran newsletter
31 October 2025

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