Press Release by Teresa Kok “The APEX university and the need for reform of education system”
As a Universiti Sains Malaysia (“USM”) graduate, I am indeed proud that my alma mater has been given the honour of being the first and only APEX university in Malaysia. Since its establishment, USM had grown by leaps and bounds and well deserves the honour.
However this is also a good time to reflect on the general quality of all levels of public education in our country and ask whether we have done the best we can over the past 51 years to bring into being an education system that is comparable to the best in the world.
Indeed, we know that our universities have slackened over the years in terms of international ranking and we have fallen behind even regional universities in the region such as Hong Kong University and National University of Singapore.
It is high time that the ministries concerned carried out a comprehensive review of the subject and come up with concrete steps to restore the standing of our universities.
Top considerations must be the elimination of political considerations in the appointment of top university administrators such at Vice Chancellors’ and Deans’ levels and the recruitment of teaching staff and faculty on the basis of merit and performance and not on political and ethnic considerations.
The other weakness that hampers our universities is the generally poor command of the English Language amongst faculty and students alike. We must remedy this quickly if we aspire to be a regional or international centre of learning excellence.
I call upon the ministers concerned to immediately address these serious concerns.
We owe it to our younger generations to immediately take steps to stop the rot in our tertiary education institutions as part of wide-ranging reform of the entire education system.
Teresa Kok Suh Sim
National Organising Secretary, DAP – Democratic Action Party, Malaysia
Seputeh MP
ADUN Kinrara
I wish our universities
1) let undergraduates think, debate, interact, formulate their own ideas and able to know what’s right and what’s wrong
2) let the undergraduates enjoy their youth and energy
3) produce useful employees, individuals and members of society
our undergraduates are too restricted on what can they do, wear and even think. from earlier years in schooling, they are taught only to memorize facts and pass exams. if we have to improve our local universities, the revamp have to start earlier
another difficult thing to manage is that in reality, there can be no true meritocracy in student admission or lecturer selection. we are still stuck in the need to develop a racially balance and equal society. why the goals set forth 30 years ago has not been obtained it is another matter
I would rather have a couple of “special universities” that admission of students, administrative staff and lecturers are open and free of the burden of the responsibility of social re-engineering. Let this university admit people from Malaysia and outside Malaysia and make it a very competitive and open one
treat this as an experiment and if successful, can motivate the rest to striver harder. am I advocating establishing an elitist university? my answer is, if we can produce outstanding sports person at world level, why not make exception and produce a world class university that need not carry the responsibility heaped on by the colonists and politicians?
YB Teresa Kok,
Yes, I agree with you that one of the weaknesses that hampers our universities is the generally poor command of the English Language amongst faculty and students alike. It’s also a major reason why our country can’t catch up with newly-advanced countries like Taiwan, S Korea and Singapore in terms of industrial growth and other areas. Our graduates go find jobs straight after stepping out of universities whereas in those countries many of the graduates try to become employers by starting their own enterprises using the skills and knowledge gained in universities. That’s why the number of our unemployed graduates increases year after year.
In the old days, whenever say we have problems with our eg. roads,our University will be consulted to find a solution.Nowadays, we get foreign consultants because the authorities know that our universities will have no solution to the problem.
We seldom hear of our Professors being invited to lecture in the top Universities of the world.
Our universites should be judged along these lines and not by voting.
Recently I had the opportunity to meet up with a bunch of people from local universities. They were heads of departments or whatever. And they all had allocations for research and so on.
My company brings in a foreign consultant, a who’s who in his field at our own cost about 3 times a year to spend time training our staff. And we have even allowed him to have a full day’s session for this lot. And they came from a few Universitites all right, including USM.
Now they wanted him to do a 5 day session with them the next time he comes around. Now obviously it cannot be on my company’s time. So I suggested a Friday to Monday kind of thing. Somehow I could see that did not sit well.
Then the most ludicrous suggestion was made to use up their allocations. They wanted the thing to be held somewhere out of town in some 5 Star hotel or something. I baulked. My consultant baulked and could see that this whole thing was begining to sound like a bloody joke. I asked the consultant if they would need laboratory facilites which are available in my company and we also have a classroom facility for the training to be held and he thought that would be the only place that the training could properly be done.
Suddenly it was like as if the air had been let out of the baloon. The enthusiasm got deflated so fast. And I am talking about academics here. My foreign consultant was of course after this not so keen anymore. The thing is, these Universities desperately need him if they are really keen on pushing this particular science.