Suara Hati Ayahku

Salam and Happy depavali

Malaysian and muslim universities are found  lagging behind compared to other universities in the world because of many factors.  Among them are two.  Firstly, culture and secondly, race based composition of the entire staff.

Let us go through them one by one.

1) and (2) together ..  culture, habit  and religion.

Most of us are malays.  We brought our culture into the organization.  We take so many holidays from time to time example Eid Mubarak, Eid' Haji and many more including ..  King's birthday, Independence day, Merdeka Day, Olympic Gold Medal (if we win one), Thaipusam, Deepavali and CNY.

If we break our working system, we lost sorts of momentum.  I saw many malay students taking longer holidays than the indian students during Deepavali. From serious questionings, they claimed it was hard to get bus ticket back to the university.  Basically, 7 - 10 days were lost with each of the above celebrations.

Our universities can compete on better grounds but as malay muslims incorporated together ..  we can see some staff going for prayers at 0400 and 0430 pm.  After prayer, the staff who come back to their desk .. is rarely seen.  Most staff after the prayers exit towards cafeteria and many more places like nursery to check their beloved ones.  We took 30 minutes from our working system to pray late evening in congregation.  In theory, we should pay back and wait until 0600 pm.  If that is so, according to productivity , we gain some but most of the time we lost.  Practice is different from mathematics.


During important meetings, according to the MEMO, we are asked to assemble at 0900 am but the main player(s) and minister came a bit late.  If he came later than 30 minutes .. imagine 500 staff in the hall.  We had lost 30* 500 = 15,000 minutes .. waiting in the hall and still waiting.  In short, we lost our watch and timing.  No research, publication like this ..

2)  Motivation factor.

Most staff are very hard working when they are young.  Once they grow old with the universities, their brain and focus ran away.  He thinks of so many things ranginng from research grants, publication, teaching and learning ..to weddings, special occasions  of close relatives far and wide through out the country.

Travelling on the road from Kuala Lumpur to Penang is not easy. Similarly from JB to Penang.  We got jam on Senawang Seremban Highway.  Other countries they built highways to reduce time of journey but our highway is a bit different. We paid highly for tolls and petrol and at last we are caught in many traffic jams.

Since jam is the in thing, similar is the research and publication performance of many staff.  I pity myself a lot.  I wanted to do many things at one time , but ..wait wait .. read part (1) above.  So many holidays and cuti and 'unseen' happenings.

To grow competitive, we have to do it on equal grounds.
Example we compete among muslim universities starting with Saudia, Indonesia and Brunei Darul Salam universities. They also go Eid Fitr' and Eid Adha  and many more.  We got  many holidays spread out all over the year.

In Olympic, no malays and Bangladeshi runners have ever come home with a gold medal in 100 metre spring.  Why ? they lost easily with the Jamaicans, Nigerians and black runners from USA.

In long jumping events , we also lost.
in marathon races, malays also lost.
why?  we are from holiday and happy happy countries.

we cannot compete .. with others who have gone without  food for days.  They ran harder in the olympic because the race is their life to get rich.  Not us .. from Saudia and Petronas land.  We never feel the hardship to run against the leopards and tigers.  So we did not have the motivation to work harder.

Similar is in universities and polytechnics.  I asked one professor ..  why he did not write for the nation. He replied ..let the younger staff writes.  They write to get promotion.  Now he is a professor.  Why write anymore?  See the argument?

I ask one big officer from the ministry .. why the minstry did not enforce enough writing books for the school children among the teachers.  They answered some professors wrote books for Standard 1, 2,3  and Lower Secondary.  The professors should be writing books for the university but no .. the opposite happens.  That is why many senior teachers shun from writing seriously on their own expertise.  We spent a lot of money to stock western books all over the country.  Why can't our professors contribute to the library of this country?

Journals and many more.  That is brilliant.

But not many malaysian lay men can appreciate 1.23 impact factor journal writings.  We can understand simple writings only.  Why don't the professors write something so that the ordinary men on the streets understand a bit from his expertise.

Strange and weird.

Last night I read a report the malaysian government spent 14 million RM to a foreign consultant to develop Plan Transformasi Pendidikan Tinggi Negara 2013 - 2025 even though the country has many professors that are well recognized by the whole world.  The answer go back to step 1 above.  Culture, religion, attitudeand many more all put together.

3)  Malays

We have more malay teachers.  We also have more malay lecturers and we see more malays in the army and police force.

Why can't we have similar number of chinese and indians personnel in teaching, lecturing, askaring and polising .. etc ?

The answer .. we have to see PM Malaysia from 1957 to 2013.  Quite difficult to answer.

So why are we competing with other universities when our background is a bit different.
Why we lost sleep with UKM and UM being placed 300 something among 500 best universities in the whole world.

For your information, Singapore University, Hong Kong University, Tokyo University and many more asian universities..  since they used either their mother tongue in the university or English ..  through and through from primary to secondary to university.. the students understand many concepts better than our students because .. we are confused with so many DASAR

first dasar pandang ke timur,
second dasar PPSMI
third PTPPN and many more acronyms ..

like pmr, spm, stpm, pkm(parti komunis malaya) and many more.

Sometime as a chemistry student , i am quite confuse with so many .. acronyms as if i better focus on the periodic table instead and quickly make my way to USA.

I felt a bit sad ..  when a minister that just joined the MOE .. publicly announced that more than 2/3 of our english teachers are not fit to teach english.  But wait,  most teachers are malays. In other words, most malay teachers are not fit to teach English.  That was what he was trying to say.

See?  if we cannot teach english ..how to compete with other world class universities who write better english since they are native speakers.  We in Malaysia are code switching (English - BM - English)  most of the time.

Indian and Pakistani  lecturers did not suffer from code switching    for their ministers set things correctly from the day 1 when they got independence.  Malaysians have gone yo-yo ..  and of course the teachers and lecturers suffer too in the classrooms and lecture theaters.

We have spent more than 1 billion RM to run PPSMI but suddenly we stopped and introduced another acronym  MBMMBI.. oh god ..what on earth all this , my LORD?

I heard PDRM (polis di raja Malaysia) has gone PRDM (polis raja di Malaysia)  and the man who miss spelt this got the sack from RTM /  radio tv malaysia.

So many acronyms .and we are lost somewhere in between.  Which is which now?

We cannot beat them lah.
Tq.
Sleep and i made my mind to shut up.  He..he..

Walalhu aklam bis sawabb