I call on the newly-appointed Minister for Higher Education, Datuk Idris Jusoh to advise university administrators in the country to respect the intellectual freedom of students and to stop treating them as children if Malaysia truly aspires to achieve university academic excellence in the world.
Idris should advise Universiti Islam Antarabangsa (UIA) to withdraw the suspension of two students, Hanif Mahpa and Afiqah Zulkifli for organising a forum on the goods and services tax (GST) and inviting a Member of Parliament and PKR vice president Rafizi Ramli to the forum last May.
Idris must send a clear and unmistakable message that the new priority of the new Higher Education Ministry is to restore the academic and intellectual excellence of Malaysian universities, whether of academic staff or students, and not to continue to treat universities as factories to produce graduates based on scrolls of paper.
Dare Idris break with the UMNO/BN tradition of the past few decades to open up the Malaysian universities to the challenges of free intellectual inquiry and debate, or is Idris just another UMNO/BN Minister whose duty is to produce a nation of sheep of the UMNO/BN variety rather than independent-minded, critical and inquisitive Malaysian citizens of tomorrow able to face up the challenges of the information age?
Najib says its “hard to say”, accepting nearly a billion dollar in foreign “donation” for ILLEGAL campaign financing AND spending WITHOUT FULL DISCLOSURE is wrong.
If Najib sounds like a silly woman instead of PM of a nation and leader of a national ruling party, why would there be any hope they understand the fundamental subtle nature of real education?
Just look at the teaching of mathematics, obviously it was pulled out by someone who most probably under his PhD in education over there. Now that the US has found out that the so-called scientific approach has failed them and they are scrambling like solutions; some States have adopted the Singapore sty[e of teaching maths while some still thought their teaching is still the top notwithstanding their schools were rated just middling in the PISA tests. Hence, false pride does carry a heavy burden to our future generations. In our case, we are indeed in the last quadrant and yet we still brag of becoming wold champion! There is no doubt that we have the caliber, as proven by the recent 4 Malaysian students representing Cambridge to win the CIMA competition though not much publicity is given locally; maybe they do not reflection the dream of UMNO! Well. even Malays who are too clever by UMNO standard are practically cast aside if they think out of the box! So what hope can there be?