by Dr. Azly Rahman

My parents, like those of many of you readers too, only managed to complete Darjah Tiga/ Standard Three of their education. Poverty and the nature of ‘human capital revolution’ during the 1940s did not afford them the luxury of being in an ivory tower. Hard times.

One became a taxi driver and the other first, a seamstress and next, a factory worker in Singapore assembling microchips for a German multinational corporation. They would leave for work at four or five in the morning and come home at seven at night. That was the story of their lives. I am sure they too had the dream of entering a place called the “university.”

They spent their time -hard times- that took toll on their personal lives, raising their children to enter the university.

But they had an intelligent hunch, they believed universities will make everybody come out smarter and able to think critically, creatively, and altruistically. They did not have the knowledge of political economy to decipher the fact that universities are closely linked to the politics of the day.

I still believe what my parents believed, that universities ought to make people come out smarter and able to solve problems in as many ways as they possibly can. Universities ought to make them able to articulate ideas, expound ideas, and make the graduates closer to the ‘masses’ and not to the ‘power elites’.

Universities ought to make its graduates understand the meaning of human liberation. Universities ought to help humans have all the qualities mentioned and at the same time help them get a decent job. One that will evolve into a career and ultimately become a calling.

Like my mother especially who would say, “Belajar lah pandai pandai Ah-Lik, nanti boleh masuk universiti.” (“Study hard Ah-Lik, you can then enter the university”)’

I too believe in this mantra which says that universities must be the place to make one more intelligent.

Cultures of Disability

What has become of our public universities? Have we created cultures of disability in the way we teach our students how to think?

The public seems to be feeling betrayed. Too often now in the emerging progressive media, we hear such lamentations below:

“Our universities have lost their sense of historic and philosophical mission; we are seeing a university shackled by the ideology that has developed historical- materialistically out of the mold of Western and Eastern colonialism.”

Our academic leaders are seemingly trying hard to please their political masters of the day; they seem to be imitating the role of the intelligentsia rather than of organic intellectuals. Their creativity and sense of democracy is ‘guided’ by a philosophy of instrumentalism, rather than radical multiculturalism.

Our academic staff are overwhelmingly afraid to speak up on issues that matter most to the destiny of the nation: increasing authoritarianism, Oriental Despotism, rule of technocracy, the plundering of our national wealth by those in the ruling elites, destruction of our rainforest and our environment, blind following of the ideology of developmentalism, and the silencing of civil servants as well as academicians through dictates and documents that are archaic and styled perhaps after the rule of J.W.W. Birch, the resident of Malay settlement of the 1800s. Their minds are conditioned to obey.

Our students are being treated like extensions of the Malaysian secondary schools and they in turn treat the university as a place wherein facts are merely to be regurgitated at the end of the semester examinations. Therefore they now expect to be spoon-fed all the time, even during job interviews.

Our campuses are becoming a battleground of political leaders from the “pro-aspirasi kerajaan” (pro-government aspiration and ‘pro-pembangkang’ (pro-Opposition.) The words ‘aspiration’ and ‘opposition’ are cleverly used to create the ‘good guy’ versus ‘bad guy’ dichotomy in Malaysian politics, masking the real issues.

We need a brand new political order altogether. Our students are not skilled in reading between the lines, since they are skilled memorisers of facts and blind receptors/recipients of ideologies.

Our classrooms are turning to be real lecture theatres wherein the lecturers and the professors are mostly not keen in engaging in dialogical, dialectical, and didactical teaching. Our university lecturers/professors think they are ‘sages on stage’ and not ‘Socrates the liberator’ and a guide on the side. They have become ‘modular-type’ instructors.

Our universities are more interested in specialising themselves into this and that universities – Management, Multimedia, Agricultural, Technology, Social Sciences, the Arts, etc. etc. – undermining the value of a broad and strong foundation of the arts and humanities which should form the basis of any institution called a ‘university’. Dive and conquer through specialization. might the underlying perspective be.

A ‘Universiti UMNO’ — a little bit too much for an institution — was once mooted. The more specialised the universities are, the better they can be ideologically controlled. This seems to be the nature of hegemonic system of thinking which is prevailing.

Our graduates are being churned out in a diploma mill -some within three years only – we now have unemployed graduates by the tens of thousands. They were given the promise to finish early and they ended up without jobs.

Our academicians do not produce enough bodies of knowledge; ones that would challenge every aspect of the foundation of ideas which are prevailing today. We continue to produce knowledge base that is ‘instrumental reason’ and technocratic in nature; produced out of lecture theatres, tutorial rooms, and textbook-publishing houses that fail to critique the dominant ideology.

Our universities are not only funded by the ruling coalition party that is under scrutiny for big-time corruption, wastage, and at the brink of being replaced, but also by corporations at home and abroad that are interested in seeing that the graduates are graduating from the mold of the corporate-government-industrial complex.

Our universities are fertile grounds for the indoctrination of ideas and the funneling down of slogans – from the idea of a K-economy, Islam Hadhari to modal insan (human capital).

We continue to be sloganised.

Academicians diligently frame their research question, methodology, findings, conclusion, and recommendations to fit the citra-rasa/agenda of the ruling ideology of the day. Our universities ride the waves of Nationalisation, Islamisation, Information Technologisation, Globalisation, and now Bio-technologisation – because they choose not to stop and look at the waves first and ride them later.

We have created cultures of disability in our public universities.

Our politicians, especially those involved in education beginning from the time of Independence have not clearly understood the role of a university in a nation that is coming out of colonialism. Not enough radicalism has been cultivated on campuses.

Because the developmental agenda of the nation is tied to the role of the universities, the latter has become an apparatus of the ideology of modernisation and hypermodernisation; two continuing processes of the development of base and superstructure that define what we are now, a neo-colonialist corporatist nation that is even more complexly tied to the international system of modern slavery ruled via the regime of globalisation.

What inroads need we take to reconstruct our public universities? We must go back to philosophy for possible solutions.

Cultures of Ability

To enable our public universities, we ought to embark upon, borrowing the title of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, a ‘long walk to freedom’ by taking the following steps:

Understand the philosophy and historic mission of universities; those in the business should be able to articulate the meaning and manifestation of a university.

Understand the meaning of hegemony and how it was crafted in the previous regime of Dr. Mahathir and how we ought to craft ourselves out of it. We ought to understand how not to get into any newer form of hegemony.

We ought to understand how to be totally free and how to live a philosophical life that values the quest for meaning rather than the quest for political and material Epicureanism.

Understand theories of knowledge and its application to all spheres of university education so that we may not merely turn our ivory towers into creating people and ideas that will turn this nation primarily into a haven for economic exploitation of global multinational corporations, leaving the rakyat homeless in the house capitalism build.

Our universities are increasingly influenced by market forces in that we become slaves to industries that are themselves slaves to technological inventions that do not have an end to their own progress.

Our graduates in the scientific and technological fields are discovering that they are becoming victims to the onslaught of shifting technologies and the emotionless system of advanced capitalist formation that shift jobs and retrenches people in the name of corporate downsizing, corporate re-engineering, and in meeting the needs of specialised labor.

This means that these major global corporations that dictate the needs of labor to be produced from our universities are finding it more profitable to either automate or to move their operations to nations that can sell human labor even cheaper.

Understand the role of universities viz-a-viz for a truly democratic nation; in a democracy that values pastoralism and meaningful participation rather than one that advances protectionism and the plundering of public wealth.

Study progressive reform movements that have helped advance the development of intellectual culture in universities. Create students who are radical enough to challenge not only corrupt practices but also challenge paradigms of thinking. This is the ethos that create frontier thinkers in any society.

Learn to deconstruct ideology by understanding what the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas call ‘ideologikritik’, the art and science of understanding the structure of knowledge and the human-constituted interests which embody it.

By understanding how knowledge, particularly instrumental/technical knowledge is constructed, and who owns and control its development, we can better understand how to deconstruct it to become more humane.

Inject critical theory and critical sensibility into our daily academic practices. Familiarise ourselves with the work of institutions such as The Vienna Circle, The Berlin School of Logical Positivists, The Frankfurt School of Social Research, The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, LEKRA, ASAS 50, and our own Malaysian school of progressive thoughts.

Encourage cutting edge social and cultural research and understand alternative economic theories that value the development of the people, by the people, for the people.

Improve the quality of Foundation courses so that they may help our graduates ground their studies and future practices in the reading of great works in cross-cultural, inter-religious, and socially-real human experiences. Revamp foundational studies to emphasise on deep and broad reading of great work of literature and the humanities and to have students read timeless classics of Asian and world cultures.

Implement Affirmative Action and Cultural diversity policies that will help us understand and be aware of what ‘Equal Opportunity Employment’ means. Have color-blind policies that include total desegregation of universities that are too ethnocentric. Implement principles of meritocracy as well.

Improve instructional practices across the board, taking advantage of emerging digital technologies that will be used for the advancement of ‘digital proletariatism’ rather than to enrich computer technology vendors well-connected to politicians. Turn lecturers/professors into powerhouses of teaching faculty; ones that are not only well-versed in their subject matter but also skilled in delivery.

Improve faculty workload so that they may have time to think like a philosopher rather than be, like a ‘homo academicus’ in the age of the smart machine, the academician who is being caught in the conveyor belt of knowledge production controlled by those who own the nation and international production-houses of knowledge.

Ignite intellectual fervor in our students. Challenge them with more and more questions, like Socrates did with the Athenians. To be smart one’s thinking need to be radicalised. Encourage students to be involved in political organizations and be radical idealists while at the same time emphasise the need to be academically superior as well.

Improve students’ higher-order thinking skills, challenge them into newer intellectual heights. Encourage them to express their views, cultivate their radicalism and nurture it so that they may become the best and most ethical leaders our nation will benefit from. Award those who can think more than just outside the box but those who can destroy old boxes to create newer and better ones.

Feed the radical students with more and more radical theories of social change, so that when they become leaders they will ignite peaceful revolutions that speaks truth to power and bring happiness to the poor.

Ensure that politicians who do not know much about university education do not interfere with learning. Allow as many politicians from as diverse camp as possible to dialogue with students so that the latter can sample as many ideologies as possible or even challenge the invited speakers.

Involve all levels of people in continuing education. The university must encourage each one of the staff members to achieve as much as they can through programs in continuing education and professional development.

Attract competent teaching faculty from diverse philosophical perspectives to intellectually enrich our students in the universities. Bring in scholars who live and die with their ideologies – capitalists, free enterprisers, Marxists, neo- Marxists, modernists, post-modernists, religionists, atheists, nationalists, internationalists, rockers, rock and rollers and rappers.

Let a thousand flowers bloom in each and every Malaysian university.

Monitor and deal democratically and dialogically with all forms of extremism in thinking. Do not witch-hunt them or order the courts to shut them up.

Explore the idea of creative de-evolution and ‘revillagisation’ as an alternative to urbanism. We should evolve into peaceful and cultured people of the rural and urban greens.

There is beauty in agricultural economy, over the excessive brutishness of industrialism.

Explore transcultural socialism and its philosophical and practical underpinnings; one based on a system of moral economy that ensures equitable, regulative, and distributive justice and one rooted in the supremacy of metaphysics and global ethics.

Since we are interested in the future of our children’s intellectual development, let us begin our dialogue on how to reconstruct our public universities.

Let us inquire into the complex relationship between the State and the Universities and how the contradictions are always present. How much intervention must the Universities allow the State to have?

To whom must the allegiance of the universities lie?

Abolish repressive clauses in the University and University Colleges Act of 1971 and discard the Surat Akujanji that has been used to instill fear in students, staff, and even thinking academicians.

Education is about renewing prosperity, rejuvenating hope, and redefining our practices.

Above all, education is about educare (from the Latin) meaning the drawing out of human potentials, so that our students, as my mother would say, “boleh jadi orang pandai, boleh tolong anak bangsa.” (“can become intelligent and can help the children of your race”)

I would adapt her notion of social justice to boleh tolong bangsa Malaysia (to help the Malaysian race) or, better still, borrowing the great storyteller Pramoedya Ananta Toer, “boleh tolong anak semua bangsa.” (“to help the children of Humanity”)

Let us see if we can create a university as such — intellectual progress requires the cultivation of such radicalism. Or let us see which State will be the first to create such a radical place of unbounded, pleasurable, meaningful, and lifelong learning.