MALAYSIA: Election results will impact on higher education

National and state-level elections held across Malaysia earlier this month occurred against a background of inter- and intra-ethnic tensions, reflecting in part long-held resentments about the constitutional privileging of Malays over Chinese and Indians, who have serious complaints about access to universities and scholarships for their offspring.

The election results have upset the old dispensation and have important implications for the future of the country, not least in its university sector. The opposition, weathering an all-out and one-sided onslaught by the state-controlled media, has denied the ruling Barisan Nasional or National Front coalition a two-thirds majority nationally for the first time since independence, while four states have slipped out of the coalition's grasp.

Following the May 1969 race riots which began in Kuala Lumpur, the Malay-dominated coalition formulated a so-called New Economic Policy that created a quota system for university entrance. The Malays, who are constitutionally defined as 'bumiputera' or 'sons of the soil', were to have the full backing of the state while the others would have to make do as well as they could.

In 1957, at independence from the British, Malaysia had no public universities. The first, Universiti Malaya or UM was created in 1962. The second, Universiti Sains Malaysia, was based in Penang in 1969 while two more were created under new policy in 1970 and 1971. By 1999, there were nine public universities.

Granting privileged access to these universities, and to scholarship funding for overseas university placements in Britain, America Canada, Australia and New Zealand, was part of the pro-Malay affirmative action programme. This was intended, so the architects of the policy believed, to bridge the economic gap between the Malays and the so-called 'immigrant' races.

The Indians and the Chinese, some of whose bloodlines in the country go back three centuries or more, resorted to sending their children overseas at their own expense – if they could. This, of course, applied only to the middle-classes while the talented sons and daughters of working-class Chinese and Indians were frozen out.

But when university tuition fees overseas rose dramatically in the 1980s in Thatcherite Britain and other neo-liberal dispensations, this window also closed for many of the wealthier Chinese and Indians. At the same time, the rising overseas costs put the squeeze on government funding for the Malays. As a direct consequence, the competition for places in Malaysia's universities, both state and private, intensified and in the late 1990s two pieces of legislation were introduced to address the situation.

First, in 1995, came an amendment to the Education Act and a year later the Private Higher Education Act was introduced. Under the latter, several corporations were licensed to run private universities, including Telekom's Multimedia University, the national petroleum company Petronas' Universiti Teknologi and the Open University of Malaysia, a distance-learning institution.

Overall enrolments in higher education more than trebled in the 1990s from around 170,000 to 550,000. But still the ethnic Malays remained in a privileged position vis-a-vis the Chinese and Indians. Demands for an end to the policy are still highly contentious and a source of serious inter-ethnic tension.

Some Malay ultras, particularly in the ruling United Malays National Organisation Youth Wing, even continue to call for more privileging on the basis that the Malay proportion of the population has in fact grown. Yet over the past three decades, there has been a move away from Malaysia of educated Chinese and Indians, a brain drain in effect.

I was a secondary school teacher in Malaysia for four years in the 1980s and saw a typical case of pro-Malay, anti-Chinese discrimination that shocked me. Li, the only Chinese boy in his year group at the selective school I taught at, was the highest-scoring student across the state in the final pre-university national examinations. But he was denied a university scholarship while lower-scoring Malays were granted theirs, some going overseas. Li's father was a working-class Chinese cabbie.