The country's oldest and most prestigious university has defended its poor performance after it slid 80 places in a respected ranking of the world's top-200 institutions.

The Universiti Malaya's Vice Chancellor Hashim Yaakob insisted its performance had improved despite coming in at 169 on The Times Higher World University Rankings, a drop from 89 the year before.

"Actually, UM is better this year as compared to last year as we are graded as excellent in three out of the five university categories in the survey," he was quoted as saying by the state Bernama news agency late Monday.

Hashim said that UM, which was founded in 1949, ranked among the best 100 universities in the categories of arts and humanities, social sciences, biomedicine, science and technology.

He also blamed UM's poor showing on increased competition with more universities surveyed for the ranking this year, as well as a new evaluation category which rated universities on the employability of graduates.

"In the new category, they asked employers to list the universities with students who are employable. We do not know which employers they approached," he said.

An embarassment

The results published over the weekend showed the University of Malaya on par with China's Shanghai Jiaotong University and Russia's Novosibirsk State University.

Its grading was an embarrassment in Malaysia, where the last two prime ministers both attended the institution, which is considered to be the country's best.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has called on UM to study the reasons for its decline.

"I am very sad to hear the news. It must look into this and find out what is happening. By doing so it can take appropriate measures to halt the decline," he was quoted as saying in New Straits Times on Sunday.

Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang on Tuesday accused Hashim of being in a state of denial over the university's performance, warning it would plunge out of the rankings altogether next year if nothing was done.

He said it would fare even worse if its governors "persist in their denial syndrome and refusal to wake up to what all Malaysians have known for a long time - the sharp drop and decline of academic excellence and university standards of Malaysian public universities," Lim said in a statement.


Malaysiakini's Crisis in Higher Education special reports