Referring to recent developments in higher education in Malaysia - for example, the proposal to create a 'super-university' focused on research - I have a few thoughts from comparisons with foreign universities with a top research reputation.

The state of university research in Malaysia is woeful by any respectable standards. Decades ago, Malayan universities could be counted among the best in Asia. Yet, in recent university tables, our universities lag sadly behind regional counterparts.

And this is merely in Asia. It would be almost comical to try to compare our universities to top institutions like the Ivy League universities in the US or Oxbridge in the UK.

Certainly, funding is a very important factor in determining a university's research capabilities. Harvard University in the US receives more money in grants from government, industry and private benefactors than all the universities in Australia put together! One can imagine what sort of financial gulf exists between local institutions and the elite international universities.

However, there is a reason why such amounts of money get poured into top universities - anyone who makes a contribution knows that such institutions will make the maximum use of the money. And hence we come to the big factor which truly defines the exclusivity of the top universities: human resources.

The top universities have world-class academics populating their ranks, people who literally wrote the book in their respective fields.

A cursory examination of the faculty list reveals something that might seem surprising at first: alongside the Smiths and Browns, there is a healthy proportion of Chandrasekhars, Chans, Shklovskiis - in other words an intellectual menagerie of top minds assembled from across the globe.

Here, we lament the brain drain of professionals and intellectuals from our country. But is this a very big surprise, considering the racially-bigoted selection processes for entry into local universities? Even for scholarships to foreign universities, the selection process still leaves hundreds, if not thousands of deserving students in the lurch.

In my university course in the UK, there were a couple of Singaporean students on full government scholarship. After graduating, they are bonded to work for the government for five years.

I am at about the same academic level as those Singaporeans, yet I do not have the opportunity to get a single sen from the Malaysian government. Despite my love for my homeland, I seriously doubt that I will end up working back home.

On one hand, Malaysia is a dead-end for the field - I want to go into (physics research); on the other hand I feel no obligation towards an education system which has abandoned me.

In essence, the brain drain, nay, hemorrhage this country is experiencing is because hardly a finger has been lifted to try to stem it.

Another problem, of which more has been said about, is the flawed educational philosophy which is prevalent locally. The memorise-recall-regurgitate style of learning permeates the entire
hierarchy of local education, from primary school all the way to tertiary education.

It is hardly surprising that the end-products of this system are less than intellectual. The stratified thinking that local education produces is hardly conducive towards promoting original thought.

The more cynical among us might see the local education system as not much more than a mill to produce mindless robots to work, reproduce and die, without questioning authority.

Which brings us to the next point. By nature, intellectual research involves deep questioning of the established status quo, to unveil and create something new out of the spirit of inquiry. In the natural sciences (that which I am most familiar with), a spirit of rebelliousness is almost essential in undertaking research.

This can be seen in the youth of groundbreaking scientists. Einstein published his most profound works before middle age; Watson and Crick were still young men when they discovered the
double helix of DNA; the average age of the researchers at the Manhattan project (which created the atomic bomb) was 26.

It is probably no coincidence that all the elite universities happen to be hotbeds of activism, of idealistic and brilliant young people eager to make a difference in a world controlled by cynical and greedy old fogeys.

In addition, elite universities are allowed to operate independently of the establishment. While they may receive government funding, they all have free rein in their own administrative and intellectual matters. Amidst the recent wave of conservatism that swept the US recently, the universities resolutely remain bedrocks of liberalism.

At the height of Vietnam War, the Nixon government must have loved to see the back of pacifist-linguist Noam Chomsky of MIT - yet he remains there, while the Nixon administration is nothing more than a bad memory.

In this country, academics are not allowed to give press conferences without government approval. If, unlikely as it may be, a groundbreaking discovery such as the cure for cancer is made here, the researchers with one foot in the Nobel prize will still have to seek permission from some government bureaucrat to announce it to the world.

University students are not allowed to involve themselves in opposition politics (support for the ruling party is, of course, welcome), mega infrastructure projects are recklessly carried out while development of human resources is neglected (sort of like wanting to buy the latest Pentium IV processor while you have only MS-DOS 5.0 to run on it).

Grandiose statements proclaiming the reinvigoration of local research might sound good, but it is all hot air until something more concrete is done to rectify the problems that plague the local intellectual scene.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)