Whither democracy in our varsities?

TWO recent incidents prompted this week’s column: Muar MP Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman being barred from entering a university for a dialogue session with students at the end of last month; and a town hall meeting last week with the Higher Education Minister that reportedly saw students less than impressed by the responses – or rather, non-responses – from the Higher Education people at the political and civil servant levels.

These two events had me thinking about what I call the “undemocratisation” of Malaysia’s university campuses. They have been that way since the time of former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

First of all, what do I mean by “undemocratisation”? To me, it means that the two most important ingredients that make up a university, which are the students and the academicians, have been subjected to a “peasant-nisation” by university administrations.

The democratisation of universities should see the administration serving the academicians and the students, but in Malaysia, the opposite is true in most public universities, making the vice-chancellor (the person usually in charge of student affairs) the “little Napoleon”; the Senate (the university’s academic authority) the aristocratic bunch pandering to the autocratic leader; and both lord it over the “peasant” students and “farmer-academicians”.

In this situation, the academicians and students are not free to carry out the responsibility of knowledge dissemination to all levels of society, and also are not free to criticise the policies of the government and its institutions. This is how it’s been since the passing of the Universities and University Colleges Act (Auku).

And though a minister might say the ministry is not involved in a university’s affairs, he or she is, in fact, the person responsible for appointing all the little Napoleons that run public universities using the people’s purses.

This undemocratisation of Malaysian public universities occurred in three ways.

Firstly, the vice-chancellors as well as the top management of deputy vice-chancellors and deans are chosen from what I believe are lacklustre academicians who show no affinity for the idea of using knowledge for societal change. Many of these academicians subscribe to the simple idea of academic excellence towards career mobility. Period.

If an event like a dialogue session between students and supposedly “questionable” speakers like Syed Saddiq or the likes of activist-lawyer Siti Kasim and even yours truly is organised, I’m quite sure the administration will worry about how not to risk their ties to the government, future honorific titles and post-retirement positions on company boards.

Thus, these administrators require all intellectual and academic activities go through the vice-chancellor or top leadership. My question is, what the heck for?

To enculturalise innovative, critical and out-of-the-box thinking, we must allow both academicians and students to explore their potential to the max. Saying no to this and no to that using the lame excuse of “preserving the harmony” of the campus is not how you do that.

When I was a student leader in the United States and Scotland, we never had to get permission from the VC for any activity. It was enough that we informed the administration about our plans and they would simply ensure the facilities requested were appropriately used. It is true that racial and religious tension is a problem that this country has to worry about, but the university administration can simply ask the students to invite a seasoned professor to be a panellist or discussant to balance the event. Denying entry to a speaker instead by saying a form was sent to the wrong person is unacceptable.

A similar thing happened to my friend Datuk Ramli Ibrahim, a celebrated artiste in classical Indian dance, when he was denied entry to a campus for fear perhaps that Muslim students might suddenly convert to Hinduism after one talk. In that case, the administration would have been welcomed to put up a diehard professor of Islamic conservatism to give his or her views and let the students ask about any “spiritual disturbances” that they might feel.

The second undemocratisation aspect of universities lies in the fact that, more and more, academicians themselves do not care anymore about educating students towards societal change.

The academicians nurtured under the Auku and ranking systems now look towards numbers to demonstrate excellence in their careers and responsibilities. Their goal is to publish more and more papers, secure as many research grants with as many zeroes as possible, make sure they ask their friends to cite their papers, and be seen in wefies with ministers and high-ranking ministry officials.

That was why when Syed Saddiq and, previously, Ramli were denied entry, there were no protests from academia.

The third undemocratisation aspect of universities is campus design.

Starting with the planning and architecture of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in Skudai, Johor, public university campuses have gone with a Melayu or “Muslim kingdom” type of architecture. The monumentalisation of the chancellery as well as its centralised siting always on a hill is a testament to this kind of planning. Where is the student union, you may ask? Well, you will have difficulty finding it.

Then the fenced-up and heavily guarded “gerbang”, or entrance, projects an image of a high-security facility. I have travelled to many countries abroad and I will tell all Malaysians that I have yet to find an imposing gateway with a heavy guard presence at the best of the best universities in the world. The great universities of the world become part of the cityscape they are located in as there are no borders between institution and city. The architecture of Malaysian public university campuses resemble, at best, an expensive and exclusive boarding school.

If my fellow Malaysians want to know what went wrong with this country, I have always said that it began at the universities where democracy was replaced by archaic top-down management and monumental architecture that celebrates the administration rather than the university’s raison d’etre: the students and academicians.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.