GERAK Media Statement 28 August 2019

WE refer to the 20-page statement by Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, on August 23. The report’s conclusion that our national poverty line is too low, leading to gross underestimation of poverty, has been widely reported. 

Alston also criticises the lack of access to data collected by public funds, which has precluded research that can inform policymaking and help lives.

Alston pointedly notes: “Unlike the great majority of similarly situated countries, Malaysia does not provide full access to key household survey microdata, stifling both governmental and independent research and analysis on poverty and inequality”. 

This UN document lends urgency to a problem that has plagued academic research for decades. Malaysian researchers, in academia and beyond, have had to painstakingly request data, and are at the mercy of federal officials.

In Malaysia, researchers face prohibitive obstacles to obtaining public data from both federal and state government agencies.

Even when granted access, often only selected portions of the datasets are provided, not meeting the requirements of the research project. 

Malaysia is blessed with an abundance of data. Publicly funded surveys, mainly conducted by the Department of Statistics, provide immense resources that can be analysed for the public good. 

Malaysia compiles data on demography and population, manufacturing firms, agriculture and plantations, the labour force, household income, and a host of other fields.

The breadth, national representation, sample size and regularity of these datasets are unmatched by any research project. These datasets hold a wealth of potential information and insight, and are immensely useful for social science research and policy solutions. GERAK commends the government’s commitment to open data, initiated in 2017. We gratefully acknowledge the constructive work and forward-looking attitude of government departments, notably in operationalising the public data hub data.gov.my.

However, there is tremendous room for improvement. 

In this regard, GERAK calls on the government to honour its commitment to make public data accessible for research in an open and complete manner. 

Researchers require raw data to conduct original, meaningful and impactful research – that is, data that has not been processed, converted or summarised.

The “open data” page of the Department of Statistics currently does not provide access to raw data for research, in line with open data principles. It provides only statistics that are already aggregated and summarised by DoS and other agencies. 

The shortfall is particularly acute in some areas of national importance, including household income and expenditure, labour markets, firm-level surveys and environment.

We urge the government to make robust and comprehensive progress in the open data initiatives under way. 

In making national survey data accessible, we urge the government to uphold three principles in formulating new laws and regulations:

1.    Completeness: Malaysia’s open data policy should encompass datasets across the spectrum of sectors and issues, to be provided in full. 

2.    Original form: Researchers need raw data in order to generate new information and fresh insights, in order to contribute to public knowledge. Concerns over privacy can be mitigated by anonymising datasets, while retaining important variables such, as location, gender and ethnicity.

3.    Accessibility: We commend the progress of placing data online, specifically through data.gov.my, and look forward to further expansion. We urge that large datasets be placed in the public domain free of charge, to catalyse research and broaden participation in policy analysis. Moreover, data collection costs have already been defrayed by public funds, and online platforms incur minimal expenditure. 

Members of academia are partners, with government and society, in creating public knowledge. In increasing public knowledge, we are bound by professional ethical standards. 

GERAK trusts and hopes that, through application of the three principles above, Malaysian researchers will be able to access public-funded datasets, to contribute to our nation’s development.

https://www.themalaysianinsight.com/s/179162?fbclid=IwAR3ODLxs1jwjU49RMSWAe21VdmXhd0kmULNQ3dcrMOR_3fkfK2ecomcl89w

https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/489846

Press Statement: Appointment of UMS vice chancellor

The recent – and evidently ongoing – storm surrounding the selection of the vice-chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Sabah compels Gerak to issue this statement.

For Gerak, it is clear that this appointment embodies issues of autonomy and accountability. These are issues about which Gerak has consistently expressed concern, and which the Education Ministry under the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government has acknowledged.

The current controversy surrounds the appointment of Taufiq Yap Yun Hin as the new vice-chancellor.

Taufiq is a chemist, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, United Kingdom. 

And, unimportant as it should be from an academic perspective, he is Sabah-born and the first ethnic Chinese Malaysian to be appointed vice-chancellor of a Malaysian public university.

There are now false allegations circulating that he was selected by Education Minister Maszlee Malik, without consultation and he was selected because of his religious leanings.

The selection of vice-chancellors has changed – though not fast enough – since the days of the BN. 

Inputs from various academic organisations, through written proposals and even a widely-reported town hall meeting in Universiti Malaya on July 23, 2018, have contributed to this change.

Taufiq’s appointment was not made solely by the minister but on the recommendation of the new, autonomous Education Ministry Vice-chancellor Selection Committee that vetted and interviewed all the candidates on the basis of academic merit. 

Scholarship and intellectual leadership/vision were core criteria.

Gerak knows of the quality and integrity of individuals in the committee and stands by their decision. We also know that various UMS organisations, including their academic staff association, PSAUMS, are fully supportive of Taufiq’s appointment.

As for Taufiq’s religious inclination or background, what he does in his own time, as long as it is within the law and also within the terms of his tenure, really should be of little concern to us all.

It is what he will do for UMS as an intellectual leader – and there is certainly much to be done – that should matter to us now.

UMS, as most of us are painfully aware, is coming out of a period of much internal conflict and turmoil that have little to do with academic excellence and a lot to do with power relations and political interference under the old regime.

Employability figures for UMS graduates currently are very low – at about 61 percent. Hence, perhaps it would be better for us to support the new independent leadership in UMS, to reform UMS to be among the best.

In this regard, we certainly believe that regional universities should be in constant communication with state governments, and, indeed, the wider community, including civil society organisations and industry.

But, public universities are federal entities that must be run on the basis of the best academic leadership available.

Recommendations for vice-chancellors and chairpersons from local politicians, like chief ministers, are welcome but these candidates must meet the high standards now being set by the independent Vice-chancellor Selection Committee.

These political leaders would do less harm by running their states and constituencies than by interfering in the running of our universities.

Gerak's stand is that political considerations must never be the criterion for the appointment of vice-chancellors. 

This, we strongly suspect, is one of the major reasons why university leadership – and Malaysian public universities on the whole – failed to move far enough forward under the BN regime.

The Harapan government evidently wants to change all this. It wishes to reform public universities; to try to make them world-beaters. This is not going to happen overnight.

But it would happen much sooner if political leaders were to embrace the new thinking of Maszlee and the Harapan government as regards merit-based appointments to top university positions.

Indeed, in this age of globalised knowledge and progressive thinking, it is time to discard our old parochial ways and think wider.

In the case of UMS, suffice it to say, the best was appointed – from a list of shortlisted candidates all of whom were Sabahans.

We could, of course, indulge in this tired and tiring post-GE14 game of griping and sniping. 

Or we – inside and outside UMS – could rally behind the new vice-chancellor and not undermine him without reason. For the sake of progress and development in UMS and in Sabah. 

Gerak Executive Committee
11 August 2019

https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2019/08/11/ums-vcs-appointment-merit-based-not-made-solely-by-minister-says-education-movement/

Times Higher Education

Kowtowing to politicians is shameful and wrong

If universities don’t assert their expertise, demands from ministers and industry will become ever more misguided, says Dawn Freshwater

August 8, 2019

By Dawn Freshwater

Source: Getty

We’ve all heard, again and again, about the importance of supplying the world with students who are “job-ready”, in a world where roles appear, disappear and change all the time. But what does that really mean? How should we approach that task – if at all? And who is in the best position to decide?

Universities were traditionally in the business of introducing students to the canon of human learning and creativity. But one issue is what constitutes the canon in the 21st century. Even beginning the list is intimidating because we are instantly alert to which subjects have been included and which have not. The Bible? Shakespeare? Freud? Marx? Foucault? But these don’t even scratch the surface.

How we would love our students to study everything – to be the broadest of broad thinkers, to be scientists who understand literary allusions and arts graduates who can understand trinomial equations. But we don’t have the time to create such graduates – and they would insist that they don’t have the time either.

Some critics object to our spending any time teaching all that “theoretical stuff”. Others counter that nothing is more important than teaching students to think – sometimes said in a manner that suggests that thinking would never occur without academic training, or that it has nothing to do with knowledge.

Since we cannot assume that those who make political and economic decisions understand or care about the roles and capacities of universities, I strongly suggest that it is incumbent on us to educate them on the subject, and that we do so rigorously and insistently.

The alternatives – asking politely what they would like us to do next, or apologising for failing to please – have certainly been tried in our long tradition, but they were both shameful and wrong. Universities that devote themselves to placating those who insist on their churning out graduates able to slip instantly into whatever workplace they happen to be running, will become – like all who placate – mere servants. And those they serve will become more and more demanding masters, ordering them not to waste their time on anything that doesn’t obviously serve whatever they believe to be in their own immediate self-interest.

Universities have served their societies honourably and well. But if we want to have any meaningful say in what we teach and how we teach it, we will have to talk like the masters – of arts, science, engineering – that we undoubtedly are. We must speak with the authority of knowledge, in all its complexity and with full awareness of how swiftly and exponentially it grows. We’ve earned the right.

Our towers stopped being ivory ones a long time ago. They are lookouts. We see the world at our feet – the little and medium-sized towns universities have become – and we see the world beyond. We understand the pressures of the 21st century. I’m suggesting that we make the 21st century work for us, dictating its tone rather than letting it force us to adopt approaches that we know are counterproductive.

Only those who live and work in universities know the vastness of their possibilities. We know that we can do more for our societies than the politicians and captains of industry can imagine. We should listen carefully to suggestions and requests, but never mistake them for orders. Our responses must be narratives of our own – shaped by our own understanding, experience and knowledge.

I include our students in this “we”. Universities are communities of scholars, who educate best when they educate inclusively – when students do research with guidance, helping to shape our understanding of what we do and what we should change.

As scholars, we create and re-create our canon, and we have always done so. Despite cherishing their liberal, “enlightenment” values of free enquiry, traditional universities had no problems excluding women as people incapable of conducting research. But when, more recently, our students complained that we were teaching “white culture”, we listened. When they told us to stop using terms such as “mankind”, we listened. When they wondered where gay people were and questioned our use of terms such as “race” and “disability”, we listened.

This social, political and cultural disciplining of universities, largely from within, forced us to look and think again. The result was an enormous increase in the intellectual potential available to study a much wider range of issues and problems.

We will continue to discipline our disciplines – and we’ll do it honourably. But we must insist on remaining captains of our own ships, because no one else can steer them better. That way, 21st-century universities will continue to do what we all need them to do: thrive.

Dawn Freshwater is vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia and Chair of the Group of Eight. This is an edited extract from a speech given at the World Universities Forum: Liberal Education for the 21st Century, in Dublin, on 24 May.

Global campaign for academic freedom

In light of worrying global threats, the Malaysian Academic Movement (Gerak) affirms the critical importance of academic freedom for advancing and disseminating knowledge

On 21-26 July this year, over 1,400 educators and unionists from schools and institutions of higher education across the globe gathered at the Eighth Education International World Congress held in Bangkok, Thailand.

What was evident in all the congress deliberations is that, there have been many threats to academic freedom in recent years including state interference and repression, and pressures arising from commercialisation, privatisation, and managerialism, as reported by members of Education International worldwide.

In addition, the now-common practice of hiring academic staff on a contract basis was seen by almost all participants as a threat to the progression of scholars up the academic ladder. This is especially true of new and young academics.

At the national level, Gerak is deeply concerned with these developments. We see similar strategies being employed in Malaysian institutions of higher education and feel there is a need to push back.

Like the other members of the Education International congress, Gerak affirms the critical importance of academic freedom for advancing and disseminating knowledge.

Indeed, academic freedom strengthens democracy and contributes to the common good of societies, as outlined by the 1997 Unesco Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel.

At the international level, it is clear that there is a need to intensify campaigns focusing on higher education and research, in particular those focusing on defending academic freedoms and developing partnerships with other international trade union organisations and NGOs.

Gerak believes that this is also crucial at the local level, especially in engaging with other local teachers’ and academic unions.

We must work together with local and international organisations. We must develop a pedagogic alternative that will liberate not only our minds but also our society. At a time when greed and the destruction of our world seems imminent, doing less is not an option.

Gerak Executive Committee
2 August 2019