The human factory

I must say the Vice Chancellors of our universities are superhuman.Their appointments are for a 2-year term during which time they are expected to inject new thinking into the universities, shift paradigm and catapult the ranking to a higher number.Really what can you do in two years when you are at the top, even four years for that matter.Royal Professor Ungku Aziz was at University Malaya for 20 years from 68 to 88.Recently one of the VCs contract was not renewed.That in itself is quite normal.What was not were the words and sentences used to describe why it was not renewed.They gave the impression that she was not doing anything much.Well Dato' no use arguing with the politicians.Its your own fault getting mixed up with university's administration.Should have stayed in the private sector, the banking sector for instance. I can imagine the problem in the university.I was once a Dean in one of what is now a university for a few years. Besides having to deal with all sorts of student behaviour, the staff members and the division heads pose endless dimensions of conflicting human behaviour.Those who deserve to be promoted do not get promoted.Some will rot until retirement times. Just because they dont belong to the right group.Those who know how to "carry" (ampu bodek) regardless of whether they can teach will go to the highest point in the scale.In-breeding is of course practice everywhere.We get mostly those with no experience.Up till now the Universities and Colleges Act do not allow lecturers to get part-time experience.It is in the process of being amended. The whole Act has killed students' motivation.They have become introverted and if we look at the future graduates in most universities they lack most of all self-confidence and communicative skills.Major reasons why most of them are unemployed.In the meantime the universities in the private sector develop by leaps and bound.Clearly there is a need to eliminate the many duplication of programmes and a need to sit down with employers to match industry's needs with universities' output.And that's not even half the story of the need to have the right ingredients of human capital to catapult this nation to be the first fully industrialised Muslim country in the world.