Universities accused of producing ‘worker bees’

Academics have ripped into Malaysia’s higher education blueprint, saying it made a mockery of higher education, with its focus on turning out employable university graduates, write Tarrence Tan and Mikha Chan for Free Malaysia Today.

The blueprint served a neo-liberalist business-minded purpose and was a disservice to education as a whole, they said at a forum organised by the Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Among the speakers were academicians Dr Tan Ai Mei from the Malaysian Quality Agency, Dr Chong Kok Boon from University Malaysia of Computer Science and Engineering, Dr Terence Gomez of the University of Malaya, and Geoffrey Williams, a former professor at Universiti Tun Abdul Razak.

Tan criticised the primarily market-based ideology of the blueprint, and pointed out the roles of higher education – to cater to the economy at large, human resource needs, and to foster a generation of knowledge, technology and innovation. “They say that education is supposed to produce holistic, balanced leaders with entrepreneurial mind-sets. But how do you address higher education as a public good?”
Full report on the FMT site