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?