Earth still round, despite what bureaucrats might say

COMMENT "Hi, my name is Brian Keenan, call me Brian".

 Those were the opening words I heard from Professor Brian Keenan, when I attended my first lecture in philosophy, delivered by him at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, in 1975.

Later, I was to learn that the members of the whole faculty were all on a first name basis with one another and with their students.

This spoke volumes for the personal relationship between faculty members and the students. In that university, students were treated as friends by the teachers, as fellow travellers in a collective search for truth and knowledge.

The feudalistic slave-master relationship, that traditionally characterised the interactions between teachers and students, was an alien notion that would never have survived in my university.

My university has inherited its legacy from a long tradition of western humanism in academia.

There, the university is the centre of higher learning dedicated to the search for truth, for its own sake.

It is clear that modern western education has surrendered much of this quest for learning in favour of more prosaic, utilitarian values. But the pursuit for knowledge for its own sake is still a noble objective of many global higher institutions of learning.

Western humanism

The spirit of this yearning for knowledge has deep roots in the fine tradition of western humanism. The person who perhaps best epitomises this fearless spirit has to be Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the Father of Modern Science.

Galileo was the first man who boldly proposed that the earth was round, at a time when everybody else thought that the earth was flat. There was much fierce opposition to his view.

He was investigated by the Roman Inquisition, found to be 'vehemently suspect of heresy', and forced to recant. He was sentenced to be jailed, but this was later commuted. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Nowadays, nobody would make the same stupid mistake as the Church did; the earth is still round, and Galileo's ordeal remains a valuable lesson in the world of knowledge and power relations.

My university, like most institutions of higher learning in the West, has inherited many of the best academic values of the western world.

The university was very much modeled after the fashion of the most respected and established universities in the west, such as Oxford and Harvard.

In those universities, the highest ranking members of the community are senior dons in the faculty, and not bureaucratic administrators. They practise a form of hierarchy according to their academic traditions.

The faculty and departmental heads enjoy a great deal of autonomy in academic and administrative matters. The profane world outside the universities has little impact on the internal operation of these universities. Academic independence remains one of the most valued principles.

UIA persecution shocking

I was shocked by recent events that happened at the UIA.

There, constitutional law professor Abdul Aziz Bari has been given a show-cause letter by the university for his comments regarding the Selangor sultan's recent decree on the Damansara Utama Methodist Church controversy.

Professor Abdul Aziz Bari (right) is now subject to official persecution by the university, for comments he made to the press in discharge of his official duty as a respected law academic.

When he was merely expressing his opinions on a matter of law, he was merely honouring his responsibilities and duties as a conscientious academic, in the exercise of freedom of speech.

It is against his human rights to chastise him for performing his duties.

But of course, in Malaysian universities, academia has always been made subservient to the administration.

The administrators in our top universities are no more glamorous or erudite than a gaggle of bureaucratic civil servants. Their greatest calling is to strictly observe the navigation of the political minefields in Malaysia.

This situation has to be changed in Malaysia. We must give our universities their required prestige as leaders in the pursuit of knowledge, by respecting their academic freedom.

If we subjugate them to petty rules in the name of discipline, how can we expect the country, and the wider world of international academia, to give them their due respect?

Malaysian universities have taken a beating in terms of their reputation in recent years. The international rankings of our universities have been consistently in free fall over the past decades.

One of the urgent reforms required of our country's political and education system is to restore the reputation of our centres of higher learning. First of all, we must exile petty politics from our academic world to the wilderness.

The earth is still round, regardless of what the politicians and bureaucrats might say about it, and no matter how they might froth at the mouth.

SIM KWANG YANG was member of parliament for Bandar Kuching, Sarawak from 1982 to 1995. He can be reached at sky8hornbill@gmail.com. All comments are welcomed.