Although all teachers in institutions of higher learning are highly educated men and women, not all of them can really be called and respected as academics or intellectuals. Some of them are just knowledge-processing managers or bureaucrats who merely see professorship or lectureship as a government job to earn a secure living and a pension.

For these knowledge-processing managers and bureaucrats, freedom of expression, thought, opinion and speech is not important. They just transmit to students, the existing knowledge from books, research papers and monographs produced by others, and mark examination papers according to whether the answers are compatible to those found in textbooks.

Some of these mediocre knowledge-processing managers and bureaucrats feel greatly threatened nowadays by the ideas of the freedom of expression and thought, knowing they cannot compete in an increasingly open society and globalised environment. They do not want to take up the challenge posed by foreign academics, or even young local students, to improve themselves.

Their intellectual (if we can abuse the adjective) stagnation and consequent bureaucratisation are not difficult to understand.

Incestuous relationship

All these years, teaching staff and tertiary students whose freedom of expression and thought have been constrained by the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) cannot help but be dependent on academics, however mediocre, for empirical knowledge and 'guidance'.

Only the pro-government teaching staff and those who serve as think tanks for the ruling parties and their politicians are 'brave' enough to write articles for the newspapers or letters to the editors for publication.

On the part of the mainstream newspapers, only the articles or letters written by pro-government writers and their think tanks are considered safe and secure to be published as 'voices of reason'. Inevitably, those who enter into dialogue and discourse with them in the mainstream media are also pro-government readers and supporters of the ruling parties.

This incestuous relationship between pro-government teaching staff and think tanks on one hand, and the supporters of the ruling parties on the other, has contributed to 'intellectual in-breeding' and the proliferation of many arrogant and hilariously moronic 'ideas', such as that about the US/Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999 being motivated by the US imperialist greed for oil and aimed at oppressing Muslims.

(Those who know that the bombing was to protect minority Muslims in Kosovo from being massacred by the Serbian fascists  many of whom are Eastern Orthodox 'Christians'  and that the Balkans are not known for any hidden oil wealth, found their voices drowned by the sheer number of those who insisted otherwise.)

The only way to restore truth and to expunge propagandistic falsehoods from public discourse and the knowledge system in Malaysia is to allow and encourage responsibly free expression, thought, opinion and speech of all teaching staff and tertiary students so that ideas can be openly and freely contested, within the campuses and lecture halls and in the public media.

Only by allowing, encouraging and practising these secular and universal freedoms could we as a nation hope to achieve the status of a truly modern, progressive and developed country with a liberated psychology as envisioned in Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's Vision 2020 or his former deputy Anwar Ibrahim's Asian Renaissance.

Academic honour, excellence, freedom

For these reasons, the much disputed and controversial Aku Janji pledge to be signed by tertiary teachers and students can be seen as reactionary or retrogressive. It is a secular version of the suppression and persecution of scientists, encyclopedists, philosophers and other men and women of knowledge in the 16th and 17th centuries, by European despots and their courtiers.

From a modern and secular perspective, there are always laws and regulations such as the General Orders and Universities and University Colleges Act which serve to govern the conduct of undergraduates and the teaching staff of universities, even though some of the more oppressive provisions should be reviewed or abolished altogether.

Why is there a need for the highly personalised and shamefully feudalistic Aku Janji pledge over and above the existing laws and regulations? Will our 'liberals' who write so passionately and courageously in the mainstream media against the distant and already dislodged theocracy in Kabul and Tehran also spend some time to fight against the more immediate and material threats from our earthly mediocres in the universities in Kuala Lumpur?

Fortunately, there are still true academics and intellectuals in our institutions of higher learning who are ready to stick their necks out to oppose the pledge and to protect academic honour, excellence and freedom from being assaulted by the half-baked secularists and charlatan-like modernists.

They must, however, be prepared to be labelled as fellow travellers of Osama bin Laden, communist sympathisers, Western/American agents, China's spies or sexual perverts by the political commissars in universities and the mainstream media.

True academics and intellectuals must be the fearless vanguard of freedom. Another stage of reformasi should begin now.

JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM) which produces the subscriber-based political report, Analysis Malaysia. Wong is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew, he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.