University, the Finger of the Visible Hand

by Muhammad Edham

In his book, an Ulama from Pattani, Sheikh Abdul Qadir Wangah, admonished people
who were themselves too preoccupied with matters of life to completely neglect their spiritual
education. These people, he lamented, were too awed by the immediate pleasures of life that they
overlooked a more perfect version of pleasure only available in the afterlife. This is tantamount
to exchanging something of permanence, for something temporary. This is surely an instance of
shortsightedness, a failing of vision that will result in one’s ultimate well-being being
permanently damaged. The lesson to be imparted by the author is, in approaching life and its
problem, one must have the correct vision to produce the correct action.
This lesson inevitably brought me to Michel Foucault and his genealogical approach to
history that debunks many apparent visions of past European civilization, through his analysis of
relevant discourses. This debunking is possible because what present observers of history say
about any past period could be markedly different from what the historical people, collectively,
say about themselves. Foucauldian discourses reveal a mismatch of visions happening in society,
in which, the solution to the present problem is difficult to achieve due to the solver’s
misunderstanding of its history. And it is through this concept of vision mismatch, brought to our
attention by Wangah and Foucault, that we can understand better the problem of intellectualism
in the university which I have previously written about in “The Spirit of Thinking for SOCA
Students” (editor to add relevant links to previous post- refer specifically- please check with
author), and so hoped to bring to light its possible solution as well.
Jin Kuan Kok, Phaik Kin Cheah, and Siew Mun Ang studied students from 10 local
universities in the year 2011, asking about their perception of the role of the university. The
answers varied, ranging from the fulfillment of human educational needs to career development,
but one particular finding of interest is students’ critical perception towards the way university
helps them prepare for future employment, but lacks the initiative to cultivate deeper value at the
same time. To me, this signifies a sort of mismatch in visions I mentioned above, between the
role of the university in cultivating knowledge for the ultimate good (i.e. justice) or merely for
industrial training. In the words of one student,
“I think the university does prepare me for a job in the future. But I do not think the
university is contributing to the society. I feel that the university is a system linked too
closely to the industrial world. So the university is just a tool for the job market”.
The researchers said the following in their conclusive statements, “the university is
always a place to discover, maintain, and transmit knowledge, and knowledge has been
identified as a principal drive of growth”, which seems to serve as their ground to criticize the
economic goal of the university, other than the findings cited above. However, are they correct in
what they have maintained though? Is truly university, the beacon of knowledge we thought they
are? Is the slogan of our university, “garden of knowledge and virtue” accurate to the reality of
the institution’s concrete nature?
. Chang Yi Chang and Choo Chean Hau introduced in their writing the concept of
academic capitalism to describe the development of Malaysian higher educational institutions.
The concept, the two defined, is “an umbrella term for capturing the wide array of market and
market-like activities universities engage in to generate external revenues from education,
research, and service”. They were critical of the way that Malaysian universities modified their
values, aims, and curriculum to meet the demand of the market, resulting in a drastic reduction of
academic freedom necessary for pure intellectual growth.
This is only so true if we peruse the discourse of the higher education institution itself; in
other words, we should ask ourselves what does it say of itself that makes and guides its very
being? And so the Malaysian Education Blueprint answered “On quality of graduates, the
Ministry aspires to increase the current 75% graduate employability rate to more than 80% in
2025”. This describes the operationalized quality of university students as well as the benchmark
that the government set as the direction of growth for the institution. In terms of student
achievement, the national philosophy of education is resorted to, emphasizing “the balance
between both knowledge and skills (ilmu) as well as ethics and morality (akhlak)”. These are
translated into 6 attributes expected to be cultivated in students as shown below:

1. Ethics and spirituality

2. Leadership skills
3. National identity
4. Language proficiency,
5. Thinking skills,
6. Knowledge

While these attributes are desirable for a person’s growth into a good human being and citizen,
the framing of methodology to acquire them as outlined in the blueprint is imbued with overt
political economic flavor. The blueprint stated the major developmental path in terms of “10
Shifts address(ing) key performance issues in the system, particularly with regard to quality and
efficiency”. Among the key shifts that pertain to university students demonstrated the said
political economic motive framing:

Shifts Descriptions
Holistic, Entrepreneurial and Balanced Graduates “There is a mismatch in the supply and demand of
graduates, with employers reporting that graduates
lack the requisite knowledge, skills and attitudes”

“It is important to move from a world of job

seekers to a world of job creators”

Nation of Lifelong Learners
“Creating opportunities for students and
academic staff to acquire entrepreneurial
skills and pursue their own enterprises”
“Enables Malaysians to meet the changing skill
needs of a high-income economy and maximises
the potential of individuals who are currently
outside the workforce through reskilling and
upskilling opportunities”

The outcome on students expected through the planned development is stated as “a

graduate with a balance of akhlak and ilmu that better prepares them for employability in
today’s global economy, and for grappling with the complexities and new challenges of the 21st
century”. This statement might as well imply the subservience of the aforementioned six virtuous
attributes to the economic value and worth of the students. The consequence of such a discourse
is that the internal policy that structures students’ education and their learning experience is not
divorced from the vision of markets and industry.
As the acting will of the country’s capitalist vision, students’ life is rationalized and
regulated to dispense with any potentiality of deviation. This is the function undertaken by the
Malaysian Qualification Framework (MQF), by providing “a set of levels and descriptors
covering all sectors, which uses the set of levels and outcomes with the intention to bring
progression and pathways together and accommodate all forms of learning”. It is through this
rationalizing framework that student experience the reality of their education, the classification
of qualifications (degree, diploma), the delineation of learning outcomes, quantification of
learning (i.e. credits).
In IIUM, the influence of MQF can be traced through its assessment policy. Assessment
is the University’s way of standardizing its curriculum and student achievement within. Learning
as such is operationalized into a certain benchmark, through which students are defined and
decisions about them can be made. The policy states “assessment should enable the University to
audit and certify that a student has achieved the learning outcomes and academic standards for
the grades and qualifications”. This obviously means that student learning is structured, and
such structuring is sanctioned; compliance with the regulation will result in certification, and
failure will not. Here, one can already surmise that certification is the concrete indicator of
learning and thus, would not be surprised to see, through this regulation, that it also becomes the
actual indicator of learning.
The assessment policy further outlines different roles significant for the maintenance of
the order described above. The university, deputy rector and its supporting office members,
centers, institute, departments, course coordinators, academic staff, and students were all defined
in their roles and responsibilities, constituting the social order that most students are familiar
with, today. The sanctioned importance of assessment for students is spelled out in several
obligations outlined:
 i. ensure that they are properly enrolled and that they observe attendance and disciplinary
rules; otherwise, they may be refused assessment;
ii. be aware of the rules of progression and requirements for graduation;
iii. inform themselves on the University policies about academic honesty, legitimate
cooperation, plagiarism and cheating, and timely submission of work;
iv. ensure that they understand the requirements for examinations and other assessment
tasks;
Acknowledgment of students’ formally defined responsibility matters for it makes visible the
power dynamic they are placed in, and so explains their priority and primary preoccupation in
the university. The assessment constitutes the dire crux of a student’s business due to the severity
of importance attached to it by the rational order of the university itself. And the rationalization
that the university employ is the reflection of the broader rationalization in education engineered
by the national capitalist agenda. Within such a social context, pure intellectualism among
students is inefficient for it would temper their commitment, energy, and concentration on the
university. Not to mention, deviancy within it will be met with dire punishment, thus
intellectualism that gets in the way of students’ compliance with the university standards will not
be tolerated. This only concretizes the dichotomy between university instruction and genuine
intellectualism.
This cursory analysis only shows that the will of the university itself bears witness to its
own preoccupation with the country’s economic aim. Chang Yi Chang and Choo Chean Hau
were right to describe it as academic capitalism, whereas Jin Kuan Kok, Phaik Kin Cheah, and
Siew Mun Ang unfortunately erred. It is important to bring close this vision to mind as one
problematizes the lack of intellectualism in our SOCA student’s culture. This vision entails
university, not as a place of learning per se, not for the ultimate good, but rather as a training
school to produce general workers or rare capitalist masters.
The claim that our university is a garden of knowledge and virtue is emphatically well-
intentioned and true to a partial extent. But even more so, it is also the finger of the visible hand,
the left hand of capitalism as construed by Bruce Scott in modern society. If we err in our sight
of what our learning experience actually is, we will be condemned into naivety that can only end
in self-destructiveness, just like the worldly man was condemned by Sheikh Abdul Qadir
Wangah into the misfortune of the hereafter that he had earlier failed to envision.
Only through our critical vision of the university, could we envision the path for
educational reformation from the bottom-up. As this very writing seeks to dismantle the
capitalist ideology underlying the institution, the subsequent step would be analyzing the existing
alternative ideologies that advocate educational reformation. These alternative ideologies are
important because it contain historical and sociological lessons that can help us explain the
current state of progress in already existing reformative effort, its success and failure, strengths,
and weaknesses. Our purpose of doing so entail the reproduction of reformative ideologies, that
would hopefully be more socially concrete and strategically sound. Of course, this can only be
realized through a series of endeavour undertaken collectively that starts by capitalizing the
intellectual tradition already at work.

Book for Reference and Recommendations

1. “The Rise of Academic Capitalism in Local Higher Learning Institutions in Malaysia:

Preliminary on its Impacts to Academic Freedom and Intellectualism” by Chang Yi
Chang and Choo Chean Hau in “Human Rights and Peace in Southeast Asia Series 4:
Challenging the Norms”
2. “Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025 (Higher Education)” by Ministry of
Education Malaysia
3. “Malaysian Qualifications Framework (MQF): 2nd Edition” by Malaysian Qualifications
Agency (MQA)
4. “The Role of the University: Malaysian Students’ Perceptions” by Jin Kuan Kok, Phaik
Kin Cheah, Siew Mun Ang in “2011 International Conference on Social Science and
Humanity”
5. “Michel Foucault” by Sarah Mills
6. “Risalah Irsyadul Jawiyyin: Petunjuk Sekalian Orang Jawi kepada Jalan Ulama’ yang
beramal” by Haji Abdul Qadir bin Haji Wangah
7. “The Political Economy of Capitalism” by Bruce Scott