REFLECTING ON THE LAW
By SHAD SALEEM FARUQI
The success of a university can be measured by how it confronts the realities of today and the development needs of the country and in its contribution to improving the lives of the people.
A MINISTRY-APPOINTED committee of distinguished auditors is visiting various universities to evaluate our tertiary institutions on the “University Good Governance Index”. The index is constructed to scrutinise university governance, financial and human resource management, sustainability and academic governance.
Such evaluations, audits, categorisations or rankings by statutory agencies and ad hoc committees are commonplace these days. We have a surfeit of them and they cost much time and money.
Some international companies have tasted the sugary profits in this enterprise and employ primarily Western criteria to evaluate our tertiary institutions. Behind a veneer of objectivity, they ignore the socio-economic context of our society and the special roles and challenges confronted by educational institutions in Third World countries.
There are several reservations that an impartial observer may harbour against the ways universities are evaluated. First, how does one measure the intangibles that are at the heart and soul of a citadel of learning?
How does one assess the moulding of character, the imbuing of a love for activity of thought and receptivity to beauty and humane feeling, the passion for justice, the quality of humanity?
Scientific methods measure only the measurable, the visible, the tangible. To paraphrase Einstein, science cannot count everything that counts. Some of the most valuable things in life are not things and are not amenable to empirical measurement.
Second, the “systems approach” judges institutions and organisations by the formal structures and procedures in place. However, systems are as good as the people who administer them.
Unless human beings are given centrality, form instead of substance, facade instead of reality become dominant.
The crucial factor in a university’s eminence is qualified academicians with proven research abilities and a solid commitment to lead and inspire their wards to the summits of knowledge.
A university cannot become an acclaimed centre unless it possesses a large number of scholars who are the voice of their professions and who not only reflect the light produced by others but are in their own right a new source of illumination.
Third, all exercises, whether local or foreign, of measuring the performance of our institutions of higher learning, tend to gloss over the engaging debate about what a university is and what its role in society ought to be.
At Universiti Sains Malaysia last week, Vice-Chancellor Prof Tan Sri Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, in his address to the auditors, articulated his vision and mission of a university.
According to him “the ultimate yardstick for measuring the success of a university is the improvement of the lives of the people it serves. A society will attain full value from its university if society and the university are linked together and confront the realities of today and the development needs of the country”.
To Prof Dzulkifli, the university is imbued with rich, multi-faceted functions. These include knowledge dissemination, knowledge generation, knowledge application, knowledge assimilation and knowledge evaluation.
“Traditional educationists” like me heard this exposition with great satisfaction, admiration and a sense of vindication.
Over the decades, I have watched with sorrow the bureaucratisation of universities and their loss of autonomy, the commercialisation of our citadels of learning, the demise of liberal education, the excessive pandering to the professions, the metamorphosis of universities into factory assembly lines, aloofness of universities from society and the rigidity of entry criteria.
Bureaucratisation: Legally, all universities are semi-autonomous, statutory bodies. They have a corporate personality distinct from and independent of the Government.
Their enabling laws confer on them wide administrative and financial powers to embark on academic, intellectual and research initiatives and to attract, retain and produce scholars of high repute.
In actual practice, however, stifling bureaucratic procedures from several ministries subject the university-leadership to pre-decision controls at every step.
Commercialisation: Most higher education institutes these days are demanding that their academics should indulge in fund-generation through consultancies, grants and patented inventions. Links with big businesses and industry are being vigorously pursued.
There is much to be said for these developments. They generate funds and give practical exposure to staff and students. However, the darker side is that teaching suffers. Time to interact with students is allocated elsewhere. Instead of having an independent value system, the university replicates the aims and objectives of a commercial enterprise.
Emphasis on business acumen influences and distorts staff development and recruitment policies. A “new managerialism” i.e. the “rigid application of managerial techniques of business” begins to apply to universities that previously had an “identity, diversity and ethos” of their own.
Narrow professionalism: A university is not just a mistress to the professions or an assembly line of an educational factory. It is a temple of learning and a storehouse of the knowledge and wisdom of the past. It is a receptacle of art, culture and science and a mirror of humanity’s great heritage.
Our universities in their concern with narrow professional goals often fail to produce graduates with an appreciation of culture and civilisation. We need to make our curricula more broad based and to infuse it with a liberal education component.
We must provide holistic education and produce well-balanced graduates who have professionalism as well as idealism; knowledge as well as wisdom; an understanding of the realities as well as a vision of what ought to be.
Merely supplying technically sound but morally neutral cogs in an industrial wheel to contribute to high production rates will not in the long range lead to enlightened development of our youth or of our society.
Our education system is committed to developing specialisation. This is acceptable. At the same time, we need to avoid the danger of teaching more and more about less and less and of producing square pegs for square holes.
In the age of globalisation, economic booms and busts and high unemployment rates, there is growing disconnect between what students study and what their subsequent careers are.
It is necessary to train students for multi-tasking, multi-disciplinary approaches; to have split-degree courses; to produce graduates who have career flexibility and who are able to adapt to different challenges at work.
Town-gown relationships: Universities are too profession-oriented and too little people-oriented. They must have strong community links. The curriculum must be so devised that staff and students are involved in the amelioration of the problems of society. This will help to inculcate a social conscience and a social perspective.
Peace-corps type of interaction with rural and deprived communities, visits with the sick, the disabled, the indigent, the ignorant and those living in valleys where the rays of justice do not reach will do much to actualise the aim of putting theoretical knowledge to practical use.
If the university can touch the lives of ordinary people, that would be a true measure of success.
Shad Saleem Faruqi is Emeritus Professor of Law at UiTM and visiting professor at USM
