It is a sad day for Universiti Malaya

PETALING JAYA: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) has supplanted Universiti Malaya (UM) as the country’s highest ranked university in the latest survey conducted on world university rankings. (For the full report, go to this link.)

I was bombarded by the news the moment I walked into the office today. My alma mater, our pride and joy (or it used to be).

Those days, students fight to get into UM. Those days, it meant something to be from UM. Those days, one gets respect from job interviewers when they find out that one is from UM!

But alas! Those days were gone!!! And somehow I am not surprised by the downward spiral of the university and its reputation.

According to The Star Online, Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang attributed Malaysian universities' poor ranking to the failure of the institutions “to practise real meritocracy in academic appointments and promotions, as well as in student intake.”

I am not quite sure of the situation now although I don't think the quota system has changed overly much from my time. And based on my experience (which was more than 10 years back), it's a great divide between the entree points for different races. But even that would not have mattered if the end justify the means i.e. the students who were given the opportunity were able to catch up or in quite a few instances, even bother trying to catch up.

But that's only one side of the story. The other is the quality of lecturers! For a premier university, the lecturers attached to the university (or at least those in my experience) left a lot to be desired. I could count on one hand the total number of good lecturers I have had in my four years of education there. Isn't that absolutely sad?!

As if that wasn't enough, I recently discovered from a friend who is doing her MBA at UM that one of the worst lecturers I ever had the misfortune to encounter, is still lecturing at the university and that she is one of the senior lecturers there now and is of some standing within the faculty. My jaw dropped!

In any case, I believe in giving people a second chance to redeem themselves. But what irks me was that I heard that this lecturer's attitude has not changed i.e. she is still that prissy woman who is also a royal a**hole (pardon the language). It seemed she shut up an MBA student by saying that a certain question asked is not in the syllabus and thus not open for discussion. (I had it on good authority that it was a reasonable question.) In any case, how could a lecturer suppress the learning process especially within the environment/confines of an MBA Programme? To top it off, from what I heard, she still teaches her lessons using the OH Projector. And it wouldn't surprise me if the slides she is using are the same old ones she used to teach me in my first degree. (Yeah! Yeah! That's a bitchy remark.)

Gosh! If lecturers as bad as these still get promoted and are roped in to teach the MBA programme, is it any wonder that the quality of students and the quality of research produced have gone on a downward spiral.

To drop in ranking from 89 in 2004 to 169 in 2005, and to have a further drop of 23 places to 192 this year is shameful and inexcusable for a university like UM. But true to form of a Malaysia Boleh type of mentality, the downward ranking caused a national debate on the status of the premier university and the validity of the criteria used for the rankings. Yeah! Right! Blame it on the criteria instead of looking inwardly to seek for areas of improvements. How would we ever progress if at the first signs of criticism, we react defensively?

It's just a sad, sad day for Universiti Malaya. I weep for thee and for what you could have been.