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Making space for an international branch campus: Monash University

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Article in Asia Pacific Viewpoint · August 2014

DOI: 10.1111/apv.12052

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Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 55, No. 2, August 2014

ISSN 1360-7456, pp182–195

Making space for an international branch campus:

Monash University Malaysia
Ravinder Sidhu* and Pam Christie†
*School of Education, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. Email: r.sidhu@uq.edu.au
†School of Education, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia and
School of Education, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, Republic of South Africa. Email:
pam.christie@uct.ac.za

Abstract: This paper presents findings from an empirical study of an international branch campus
established through a partnership between a Malaysian property development conglomerate, the
Sunway Group, and Monash University, an Australian university known for its global aspirations.
Using Lefebvre’s concept of social space we analyse the perceived, conceived and lived spaces that
constitute the campus of Monash University Malaysia and its urban setting in the township of Bandar
Sunway. Dramatically transformed from a disused mining site and showcased as a ‘progressive’ urban
project, the township symbolises the Sunway Group’s commercial success and political pragmatism
in managing the dynamics of Malaysia’s ethnicised political economy. The broader student experi-
ence suggests that the configurations of power that shape ethnic and class relations at the scale of
the national are reproduced in the composition of the student body, in students’ on-campus
interactions and in the rhythms of their everyday lives within the township. By attending to the
material, symbolic and imaginary dimensions of one international branch campus, we provide a
more nuanced and textured understanding of the globalisation of higher education, highlighting
different forms of agency exercised by key actors.

Keywords: globalisation of higher education, international branch campus, postcolonial states

In recent decades, the landscape of higher edu-
cation has undergone profound changes associ-
ated with globalisation and the geopolitical
shifts it has entailed. Given the familiarity of the
overall contours of this landscape – neoliberal
funding regimes, marketisation, cross-border
movements of students as well as institutions,
the centrality of information and communica-
tions technology and the challenges of a knowl-
edge economy more generally – it is tempting to
flatten out the forms of these changes into a
sense of sameness across contexts. Yet to do this
masks the significant agency at state and local
level involved in producing the globalised insti-
tutions of higher education. It also masks the
fact that ‘global flows’ may be turbulent and
destructive in as much as they are powerful
forces of change. One of the effects of
globalisation, according to Sassen (2004), has
been to crack open existing territorialities to
enable different local actors to participate in
international arenas that were once open only
to nation states. In a similar vein, Singh et al.
(2007: 195) suggest that, ‘it is difficult to under-
stand the internationalisation of higher educa-
tion in recent decades without linking it to the
geopolitical changes borne of the spatial expan-
sion of global capitalism’.
The argument presented here is that in explor-
ing issues of globalisation and higher education,
it is essential to engage with geopolitical spatial
changes at the national and local levels as well
as the global. The nation state as well as local
agency are integral to understanding global
shifts in the higher education landscape. We
illustrate this argument through a case study of
Monash University Malaysia, an international
branch campus of an Australian university
established in partnership with a Malaysian
private company in 1998.
Specifically, we use Henri Lefebvre’s (1996,
2004) analysis of the social production of

© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd doi: 10.1111/apv.12052

space to show the different spatial practices and
different forms of agency entailed in the
establishment and operations of this branch
campus joint venture. A Lefebvrean framework
enables us to show how Monash University
Malaysia (MUM) is produced by different
rhythms of activities, representations and imagi-
naries. Put another way, the campus and joint-
venture may be understood as a matrix of
different spatial practices that strand together:
the economic development strategies of the
Malaysian state that included plans for expand-
ing higher education; the entrepreneurial activi-
ties of the Sunway conglomerate which linked
property development to the provision of higher
education; the internationalisation imperatives
of Monash University’s parent campus in
response to the Australian government’s higher
education policies; and the operation/existence
of a student market, willing and able to pay for
private higher education at MUM. The intersec-
tion of these different patterns of activity, with
their different representations and experiences of
the space of MUM speaks back to homogenising
master-narratives of globalisation and higher
education. It also enables a fine-grained analysis
of place-based practices and the transformation
of the urban landscape of peninsular Malaysia,
alongside an analysis of the globalised and inter-
connected space of higher education.
Through this analysis, we show that MUM is
emblematic of an emergent hybrid institutional
form of globalised higher education, governed
by market efficiencies and political pragmatism.
As we illustrate, the ethno-religious stratifica-
tion of the postcolonial Malaysian state, in con-
junction with its moves to participate in global
economic exchanges through high-tech devel-
opment as a regional education hub, provided
the conditions for the market expansion of
higher education. In this ‘cracking open’ of
what was once the preserve of the nation
state, a number of different private providers
emerged, including the joint venture by a local
Malaysian development company and an
expansionist Australian university to establish a
campus at Bandar Sunway. Like other private
higher education institutions in Malaysia, MUM
emerged as a response to an overarching state-
sponsored project to secure Malay political
and cultural hegemony, including ethnic-based
quotas that limited access to higher education
© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
International campus: Monash Malaysia
by non-Malay (bumiputera) Malaysians and
created demand for in-country private higher
education. The private sector’s successful
rescaling from national to transnational sphere
is evident in its growing profile among regional
students. As a site of productive ambivalence
(Rizvi, 2014: 278–279), the operations of MUM
raise questions about the limits of hybrid edu-
cational forms that are driven by market effi-
ciencies in conditions of political conservatism.
Who benefits and who is excluded from spaces
like MUM? And can the campus foster the
cosmopolitan and post-racial imaginaries and
solidarities that it gestures towards despite its
location in a place where ethnic politics affects
every aspect of social and economic life includ-
ing access to education?
This paper proceeds as follows. We first
provide a brief commentary on the research
informing this paper, before moving on to intro-
duce Lefebvre’s theorisation of the social pro-
duction of space. We then look in more detail at
the establishment of MUM through the four
strands of activity mentioned above: the politi-
cal and economic agenda of the post-colonial
Malaysian state; the commercial and philan-
thropic agendas of the Sunway Group; the Aus-
tralian university’s internationalising agenda;
and the specific market of students seeking to
enrol in higher education. In the confluence
of these different activities and interests, a
sociospatial account throws light on how this
particular cross-border joint venture in higher
education is linked both to the transformation
of urban space and to shifting trends in the
globalisation of higher education.
Research design
A case study approach (see Yin, 2008) was used
to inform the research design of this situated
study of an international branch campus in a
postcolonial setting.The following data sets were
accessed for analysis: readings of selective
Malaysian government policies in particular
those relating to the Sixth Malaysia Plan, the
Vision 2020 policy and the Private Higher Edu-
cation Act of 1996; interviews with staff and
students (see Appendix I) and mid-level data
(university website postings, marketing narra-
tives and student information brochures).
Analyses of Malaysia’s policy terrain were
183
 D.R. Sidhu and P. Christie
supplemented with readings of secondary
resources on the particularities of Malaysia’s
postcolonial development. Interviews were con-
ducted with existing and former staff of Monash
University both in Malaysia and Australia, and
with senior staff working in the education ser-
vices division of the Sunway Group. Student
participants were selected through snowball
sampling with the assistance of the Monash
University Student Association (Malaysia) and
chosen to capture different fields of study,
gender and domestic and international student
status (see Appendix I). All interviews were
audiorecorded, transcribed and analysed for key
themes.1
Lefebvre and the social production of space
In his work on The Production of Space, Lefebvre
(1991) is at pains to set out a theory of space that
counters notions of space as abstract and empty
– the ‘mental space’ of Euclidian geometry, the
‘physical space’ of the static container waiting to
be filled. Space, Lefebvre insists, is socially pro-
duced by human activities in place and time.
Lefebvre distinguishes between three sets of
activities in the production of social space. First,
there are spatial practices: the daily routines in
particular locations and social formations over
time. These daily routines of practical space may
be understood in terms of space-as-perceived.
Second, there are representations of space: the
‘ordering’ of space into knowledge; the maps of
planners and the drawings of architects. These
are the signs and codes of space-as-conceived.
Third, there are representational practices: the
phenomenological experiences of everyday life;
the imaginary and complex symbolisms that
make sense of space-as-lived. Put simply, in a
Lefebvrean analytic, space may be analysed in
terms of what we do in our daily lives, how we
conceptualise these activities, and how we
experience them.
Lefebvre’s triadic dialectic provides a means
of explaining how societies generate their social
space and time – their daily realities of spatial
practice, their representations of space, and
their experiences and images of everyday
life. These may be summed up as perceived-
conceived-lived, or practical-symbolic-imagi-
nary. Lefebvre’s approach links an analysis of
the forces and relations of production to the
184 © 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
historical geographies of time and place, to
knowledge, and to meaning in the everyday.
For Lefebvre, the generic term ‘social space’
does not denote a singular or static set of prac-
tices. Instead, there are ‘an unlimited multiplic-
ity or uncountable set of social spaces’ (1991:
86), and ‘the form of social space is encounter,
assembly, simultaneity’ (1991: 101). Encounters
bring together ‘everything that there is in space,
everything that is produced either by nature
or by society, either through their co-operation
or through their conflicts. Everything: living
beings, things, objects, works, signs and
symbols’ (1991: 101). In this mix of encounter,
local places coexist with national territories and
the activities of global flows. As Lefebvre states,
‘No space disappears in the course of growth
and development: the worldwide does not
abolish the local’ (1991: 86). The activities that
produce social space ‘interpenetrate’ and
‘superimpose’ on each other (1991: 86). They
may collide and clash, but they do not simply
subsume each other. In Lefebvre’s logic, social
space is never static, but always produced,
reconstituted, and transformed in restless,
polyrhythmic activities. Understanding social
space in this way enables the analysis of a
multiplicity of social relationships, on different
scales, with different logics. Lefebvre’s analytic
of different rhythms that constitute space brings
a theoretical coherence across geography,
political economy, society and culture in under-
standing the historical production of social pat-
terns and the ways they endure and change.
For the purposes of this paper, Lefebvre’s
work offers a valuable framework for analysing
the particular manifestation of globalisation and
higher education that is MUM. Holding the
notion of space as central to the production of
social formations provides particularly valuable
insights into the ways in which activities asso-
ciated with globalisation (including internation-
alisation of higher education) engage with the
territorial arrangements of nation states, as well
as conditions and activities at regional and local
levels, including sociospatial transformation.
The analytical challenge is to understand social
space as multiscalar, and to analyse simultane-
ously what occurs on a global scale as well as
‘all the spaces subsidiary to it, at every possible
level’. For, as Lefebvre points out, the global
never totally obliterates the local. In his words,

‘No single space has disappeared completely;
and all places without exception have under-
gone metamorphoses’ (1991: 145).
Brenner (1997) usefully draws out the impli-
cations of Lefebvre’s formulation of spatiality in
relation to globalisation and the nation state. He
writes:
In Lefebvre’s framework, . . . the globalisation
of capital and the re-scaling of state territorial
power are viewed as two intrinsically related
processes within the same dynamic of global
sociospatial restructuring. Urbanisation – the
source of capital’s place-based requirements
and the site of concrete everyday experience –
constitutes a third fundamental dimension of
globalisation, which is likewise superimposed
upon and closely intertwined with the geogra-
phies of both transnational capital and the
world interstate system. . . . Lefebvre views the
shifting social geographies of global capital
accumulation, the interstate system, and
urbanisation as being tightly intermeshed on
all spatial scales. . . . From this perspective
globalisation is a multiscalar transformation of
global social space, and one of its major
organisational–institutional dimensions is con-
stituted through the territorial state itself.
(1997: 139)
Lefebvre’s analysis provides two useful
dimensions for the purposes of our paper. The
first is the multiscalar logic discussed above, in
which the rhythms of global, national, and
urban may be traced as they collide, intersect,
conjoin, and separate according to their differ-
ent logics. Second, analysing space as
‘perceived-conceived-lived’ provides a means
for exploring the complexity of activities and
relationships that give rise to particular
instances and events – in this case, the branch
campus of MUM in the extended urbanisation
of Kuala Lumpur.
We start with a geospatial account of Malay-
sia itself, showing how its development strate-
gies under globalisation intersected with the
interests of Monash University and the Sunway
Group to provide the conditions for a viable
international branch campus.
A sociospatial analysis of Malaysia and urban
Kuala Lumpur (KL)
In his overview of the field of cultural geography
(and drawing on Lefebvre’s work), Brenner
© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
International campus: Monash Malaysia
(2013: 108) talks of the ‘processes of creative
destruction that have unfolded during the
geohistory of capitalist development’. These
processes of creative destruction include the
transformation of inherited environments for
resource extraction, multiple changes to socio-
environmental landscapes, and shifting patterns
of uneven development. All of these are cer-
tainly evident in the geohistorical politics and
economy of Malaysia.
Malaysia’s present configuration as a multi-
ethnic nation can be traced to the importation
of labour from India, China and Indonesia to
meet the needs of the British colonial economy.
Colonial activities to extract tin and to establish
a plantation economy of rubber for British
industries led to significant transformations of
Malaya’s natural landscape (see Bunnell, 2004:
33–34). The confluence of activities and inter-
ests of a range of actors – Malay feudal rulers,
British authorities and a multiethnic proletariat
– created the conditions for the emergence of
Kuala Lumpur (KL) in the 1850s, first as a
mining settlement-cum-frontier town and later
as a thriving commercial centre settled by large
numbers of Chinese migrants.
Malayan independence from Britain in 1957
ushered in an ethnicised consocial political
order of Malay, Chinese and Indian parties,
premised on Malay political hegemony. The
complex inter- and intra-ethnic alliances that
underpinned colonial governance bequeathed
a legacy of class fragmentation and ethnic and
social polarisation that continues to beset
Malaysia (see Shamsul, 2001; Bunnell, 2004:
36#x2013;44; also Khoo, 2006). Since political
independence, Malay political hegemony has
increased progressively; the ruling United
Malay National Organisation (UMNO) has
effectively steered the nation state towards a
Malay and Islamic ethno-religious national
identity using a variety of policy and legislative
instruments: The Education Act (1961), the
National Language Act (1963/67), the National
Cultural Policy and the New Economic Policy
(1971) institutionalised Malay cultural and
political hegemony by introducing quotas
favouring ethnic Malay bumiputeras (‘sons of
the soil’) in public sector employment, and
government contracts and more importantly for
this paper, higher education. Collectively, the
various affirmative action policies limited or
185
 D.R. Sidhu and P. Christie
curtailed non-bumiputera access to higher edu-
cation, weakened the capacities of Malaysia’s
public universities to build credible interna-
tional profiles and politicised the university
sector (Lee, 1997; Welch, 2011). While oppor-
tunities were opened for bumiputeras to partici-
pate in higher education, it remains unclear
how successful these policies have been in
alleviating class-based social disadvantage
(Klitgaard and Katz, 1983; Selvaratnam, 1988;
Tzannatos, 1991; Singh and Mukherjee, 1993;
Lee, 1997).
King’s (2003) nuanced architectural history of
KL shows that at the time of independence,
Kuala Lumpur was viewed as a Chinese town
both in demography and spatial form. For the
government of the newly independent state,
establishing a Malay identity for KL was a
priority. Malay migration to KL intensified
with the robust recruitment of a large corps of
Malay civil servants and employees in various
government-linked corporations. The urban
landscape was similarly altered to include more
Malay and Islamic-referenced buildings with
successive prime ministers adding their imprints
to KL’s urban landscape, in a bid to reclaim
it as ‘federal territory’. However, the productive
forces of Malaysian–Chinese commerce have
countered such ethno-national attempts to
dilute the city’s Chinese character and identity
(see King, 2003: 99–105). The Malaysian
government’s vision to embrace high tech
developmentalism, a policy platform we now
turn to, created the conditions not only for
Islamic referenced urban mega projects; it has
also seen the proliferation of projects engi-
neered by Malaysian-Chinese multinationals
like the Sunway Group. Small and medium
sized private higher education enterprise has
also facilitated the regeneration of older parts of
the city by seeking out cheaper accommodation
in old shophouses (King, 2003: 103).
Vision 2020: Building a knowledge-and
service-based economy
Part of the Sixth Malaysia Plan, Vision 2020, was
a development blueprint that promised social
mobility and cross-ethnic prosperity (Hilley,
2001: 7), by transforming Malaysia from
export-oriented manufacturer to an industrial-
ised, information-driven economy and regional
186 © 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
education hub. Bunnell (2002a: 267) identifies
this state-driven strategy of informational capi-
talism as ‘a specifically high tech-strand of devel-
opmental utopianism’. While holding out the
promise of egalitarian distribution of growth, it
brought new patterns of social and spatial strati-
fication. The Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC),
extending south of KL and linking wired urban
spaces, brought extensive landscape trans-
formation and urban development, but also
entailed displacement and marginalisation of
local communities and heightened regional dis-
parities (Bunnell, 2002a,b; also Bunnell, 2004:
chapter six). Brooker (2013) arrives at a similar
finding of sociospatial disadvantage in his study
of another mega project, the technopole,
Cyberjaya.
Malaysia’s universities were expected to do
their bit to contribute to the Vision 2020
agenda, and to this end a National Higher Edu-
cation Strategic Plan 2020 was proposed. It out-
lined a series of objectives resonant with other
globalising education reforms: increased access
to higher education, improved teaching and
learning, increased international student enrol-
ments, support for R & D and the promotion of
life-long learning. Perhaps one of the most sig-
nificant policy initiatives responsible for the
reconfiguration of the higher education space
was the Private Higher Education Institutions
(PHEI) Act of 1996. It allowed the establishment
of degree-granting private universities, permit-
ted instruction in languages other than the
national language (Malay) and allowed local
institutions and foreign universities to develop
joint ventures (Lee, 1997; Tan, 2002; Welch,
2011; Mok, 2013). Monash University and the
University of Nottingham were two of the first
foreign universities invited to establish branch
campuses in Malaysia in partnership with local
corporations, the Sunway and YTL Groups
respectively.
A new bureaucracy, the Ministry of Higher
Education, was established to monitor aca-
demic standards in public and private sector
higher education institutions in the wake of
higher education’s liberalisation. Public univer-
sities were now encouraged to recruit interna-
tional students, in particular, from emerging
markets in the Middle East and North Africa.
A very diverse group of local actors entered
the private higher education sphere after the

introduction of the Private Higher Education
Institutions (PHEI) Act. They included Malaysia’s
political parties,2 government-linked corpora-
tions such as the oil and gas corporation
Petronas, and various private sector corporate
actors such as the Limkokwing group of com-
panies, which run the Limkokwing Colleges of
Creative Technology. Another newcomer to
higher education, Paramount Corporation,
expanded its interests from rice, engineering
and construction to establish the Kolej
Damansara Utama (KDU) institutions.
The more successful private higher education
institutes sought public listing and expanded
their reach to Cambodia, Indonesia and, in the
case of the LimKokwing institutions, further
afield by establishing campuses in Botswana
and London. In several instances, alliances
between private higher education institutes and
real estate developers opened new possibilities
for both sides, creating markets for modern
residential areas complete with educational
amenities, while offering private education
administrators a steady flow of cash to meet the
costs of running these education institutes (see
Tan, 2002 for a description of the synergies
underpinning these commercial alliances).
Paradoxically, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis
led to a further strengthening of the private
higher education sector. Malaysians who could
no longer afford the costs of overseas education
returned to Malaysia, in the process acquiring
transnational imaginaries and new aspirations.
Families in the region seeking an English lan-
guage education also rescaled their aspirations
and now saw Malaysia as a cost-effective study
destination. Additionally, the crisis enabled the
sector to renegotiate with Anglophone partner
universities for more favourable terms in their
twinning and franchising agreements (Healey,
2008).
In the two decades following the announce-
ment of Vision 2020, the private higher educa-
tion sector has witnessed a steady increase in
international student numbers. The three biggest
markets in 2010 were Indonesia, China and Iran
(Mohammad Ismail and Doria, 2013: 111). By
2015, the Malaysian government is expected to
relax foreign ownership regulations to permit full
foreign ownership of private higher education
institutions. Currently, foreign equity is capped
at 51% (110).The private higher education sector
© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
International campus: Monash Malaysia
which until recently was concentrated in the
greater KL area has now expanded. An Education
City in the southern Malaysian state of Johor,
Educity @Iskander, is now operational and hosts
a number of foreign universities including two
British establishments (Newcastle University of
Medicine, and the University of Southampton),
the Netherlands Maritime Institute ofTechnology
and the Singapore-based Raffles University.
Johor’s spatial proximity to Singapore, a self
proclaimed, state-sponsored ‘global city’ and
knowledge hub, is anticipated to work in its
favour.
It is significant that economic liberalisation
policies and practices that have permitted the
expansion of Malaysia’s private higher educa-
tion sector and foreign ownership have not been
accompanied by political liberalisation. The
PHEI Act continues to invest significant powers
in the Minister of Education. For example,
Section 46 of the Act limits student activism by
imposing responsibilities on the Chief Executive
Officers of PHEIs over the discipline and
conduct of the student body. The Minister can
direct an institution to revert to using the
national language as the medium of instruction
under Section 42, while Section 43 permits the
government to exercise control over parts of the
curriculum by requiring all private higher edu-
cation institutions to offer courses in Islam to
Muslim students and Malaysian Studies to all
international students.
Malaysia’s private higher education institu-
tions have drawn on the expertise, practices
and discourses of their joint venture western
education partners while creating comfortable
profits, building experience and establishing
regional reputations. The close working rela-
tions between foreign partner universities and
Malaysian private higher education institutions
working in fiercely competitive domestic envi-
ronments have fostered market efficiencies and
transnational linkages, along with building an
awareness of international standards although
arguably framed by a discourse of business,
rather than critical and transformative pedagogy
(see King, 2003).
The public higher education sector, on the
other hand, has enjoyed a measure of immunity
from the cut and thrust of globalising forces. As
Lee (1997) and Welch (2011) have argued, the
sector’s imagination and logic of practice have
187
 D.R. Sidhu and P. Christie
remained firmly focused on securing
bumiputera political and cultural hegemony.
Public universities have been encouraged to
reach out to recruit students from the broader
Islamic world; however, it must be acknowl-
edged that this transnational strategy is
informed by a desire to consolidate Malaysia as
an Islamic state, even if the effects may be more
ambiguous than anticipated by the country’s
political and bureaucratic elite. In the face of
poor rankings in global league tables, there
have been calls for reform to public universities
to improve their research productivity and
increase their global engagements. Malaysia’s
public universities have struggled to build cred-
ible profiles, and to participate in international
networks (see Welch, 2011). Preserving the
‘nation’ in its current ethno-religious form, it has
been argued, has taken precedence over the
creativity, dissent and meritocracy that invigor-
ates scholarship (see King, 2003: 239–241). At
the same time, reform efforts to shift the sector
away from its self-imposed insularity, will, in
all likelihood, face contestation from Malay
supremacists within the ruling party.
An architect of new urbanisms: Transforming
‘nowhere’ to ‘somewhere’
The Sunway Group (formerly known as Sungai
Wei) was established in 1974 by Jeffrey Cheah,
a Malaysian-Chinese entrepreneur. Its construc-
tion of the Bandar Sunway township not far
from KL provides an interesting example of the
use of tertiary education provision to secure
competitive advantage in and through the
development of urban space. Sunway’s involve-
ment in higher education simultaneously with
its construction and property development
shows an intertwining of philanthropy and
entrepreneurship in the making of an interna-
tional branch campus. In the 1980s, Sunway
had purchased a disused tin mine in the Klang
Valley, which it mined further for dolomite. The
site was later transformed into an entertainment
and recreational mecca and a township, Bandar
Sunway, providing housing for a largely domes-
tic middle class population (see Sunway Group,
2014). Bandar Sunway hosts a private hospital,
the Sunway Medical Centre and several educa-
tional institutions: Sunway University (formerly
Sunway College, a twinning partner of Monash
188 © 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
University); an art and design college, an inter-
national school; and two government schools
(Sunway Group, 2014).
As an entertainment and recreational services
provider for domestic and regional tourists,
Bandar Sunway also contains shopping malls
(Sunway Pyramid centre), hotels, (Sunway
Resort Hotel and Spa, Pyramid Hotel), and a
large and well appointed US-style theme park,
the Sunway Lagoon, marketed as ‘the World’s
Largest Man-Made Sandy Surf Beach for up to
40 000 guests’ (Sunway Lagoon 2013). In a typi-
cally entrepreneurial move, Cheah’s Sunway
Group had set up a competition to generate
possibilities for developing the disused tin and
dolomite landscape, and chose the winning
entry – a water theme park – to refashion the
space into a profitable development (Sunway
Group, 2014). The Lagoon is a firm favourite
amongst tourists and has assumed something of
an iconic status amongst Malaysians.
Sunway’s urban simulation of a Disney-style
theme park in what was previously an
unvalorised space – a disused mine site – is a
remarkable example of local ingenuity in
mobilising the imaginative possibilities arising
from global mediascapes to create desires for
ephemeral pleasure, fantasy, spectacle and
excess (of a family friendly kind). Augmenting
the Lagoon’s appeal is Sunway’s Pyramid
Centre – a shopping and recreational mecca
complete with hotel, skating rink, bowling
alley, cinemas, fast food outlets, cafes, restau-
rants and luxury shops selling global brands,
such as Zara, Gap, Burberry. Fashioned in
the style of the Egyptian pyramids, guarded by
a solitary male lion (also a symbol of power
and prestige in Chinese culture), the Pyramid
Centre draws in well heeled Malaysians,
regional tourists from Indonesia, Singapore,
Thailand, and increasingly the Middle East.
Women in chadors and hijjabs accompanied
by husbands and children are a common sight
in what is conceived to be a consumption and
entertainment paradise.
Mega projects like the Lagoon are pivotal for
imagining and conceiving global cities, both in
discourse and spatial form. Importantly, they
articulate with the aspirational discourses of
governments in the region. In Malaysia’s case,
rivalry with neighbouring Singapore, a city-state
that has invested heavily re-making itself into a

‘global city’, played a part in securing the state’s
interest and engagement in the education and
tourist service industries constructed by actors
like the Sunway Group. It is not coincidental
that the campus of a globalising international
university is located in a spatial reconfiguration
of this sort, which is both aspirational and
geared towards regional leadership in so-called
knowledge economy forms. Notwithstanding
these national capacity-building goals, inter-
views conducted with staff at Monash and
Sunway revealed that MUM was conceived by
both partners and the Malaysian government as
a pressure valve to meet local demand and stem
ethnic pressure arising from ethnic quotas for
places in the country’s national universities. It is
to Malaysia’s private higher education sector
that we now return.
Private higher education: A strategic response
to the state’s ethnonationalist agenda
Sunway’s Education Group has its origin in the
1987 establishment of Sunway College which
offered pre-university programmes or ‘founda-
tion studies’, designed by various British and
Australian universities for students intending to
study overseas. Like its private higher education
counterparts, Sunway’s education interests have
benefited enormously from long standing local
stratifications, augmented further through the
broader ethnicisation policies of successive
Malaysian governments and later policies of
developmental utopianism.
The private higher education sector started
relatively modestly, providing professional
training and private tuition to Malaysians. It
began to flourish from the end of the 1970s,
spurred by a number of internal and external
forces. A major determinant, noted earlier, was
poor access to higher education for non-
bumiputeras, prompting many to study in
Anglophone destinations such as the UK and
Australia and the US. Language and ethnic poli-
tics also shaped the decisions of an increasing
number of the urbanised Malaysian middle
class to desert the public education sector in
favour of English-medium international schools,
or in the case of the Malaysian-Chinese middle
class, private, not-for–profit Chinese schools
that are supported by Malaysian-Chinese busi-
ness philanthropy. These groups act as feeders
© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
International campus: Monash Malaysia
into private higher education institutions like
MUM.
Marketisation policies in the leading Anglo-
phone countries beginning with the UK’s deci-
sion in 1978 to levy full fees on international
students, followed by Australia and New
Zealand a decade or so later, prompted students
to look for alternative pathways to offset the
growing costs of an overseas higher education.
The private sector’s twinning programmes
delivered in English, allowed students to spend
one to two years in Malaysia studying an
approved overseas curriculum before gaining
entry and ‘advanced standing’ into a British or
Australian university degree programme. For
non-bumiputeras an English language higher
education opened up opportunities for
further education, employment and migration
overseas.
The private sector’s growth was also assisted
by access to qualified academic staff who were
either unable to adjust to the requirements
imposed from 1982 to teach in the Malay lan-
guage, or unsuccessful in securing employment
in Malaysia’s public universities in the context
of preferential hiring accorded to bumiputeras
(see Lee, 1997; Welch, 2011). Many private
higher education institutions had modest begin-
nings in vacant shophouses, which functioned
as sources of cheap real estate in a city now
seeking out the novelty of shopping mall expe-
rience (King, 2003: 239). As discussed earlier,
the turning point for the fortunes of the Sunway
Education Group and other private higher edu-
cation providers was the Vision 2020 project to
establish Malaysia as a regional education hub
(Morshidi, 2010; Mok, 2013).
Assembling a ‘global’ university
Monash’s international aspirations to establish a
‘global network of interrelated campuses’ were
shaped by Australian policy reforms in the
1990s. These reforms featured declining public
subsidies for domestic students, massifica-
tion and a deregulated international student
market (Marginson, 2013). But equally, in this
neoliberalising space was the opportunity for
self-formation for an institution located in a far-
flung pocket of suburban Melbourne keen to
differentiate itself from Melbourne University,
its established and well-positioned university
189
 D.R. Sidhu and P. Christie
rival housed in the city’s central business dis-
trict. It was in this context that Monash Univer-
sity embarked on materialising its imaginary of
becoming a ‘Global University’ establishing a
wholly owned campus in South Africa and
learning centres in London and Prato, Italy (Dyt,
2007; Davison and Murphy, 2012).
From Monash’s perspective, Malaysia’s
affordability opened the possibilities of new
regional markets, although the domestic
market remained foremost in the university’s
strategising. The personal synergies between
Jeffrey Cheah and the then Vice Chancellor, Mal
Logan were also significant in helping to
cement the joint venture (see Davison and
Murphy, 2012; Dyt, 2007). Notably, few Aus-
tralian universities embarked on opening up
branch campuses because of uncertain returns,
high start up costs, currency fluctuations and
complex political environments. Indeed branch
campuses continue to be seen as a high-risk
option by universities (Altbach, 2011; see also
Heffernan and Poole, 2004). The institutional
boldness to build a global university was
emblematic of a particular time, shaped to a
large degree by Monash University’s close rela-
tionship with Sunway – a partnership described
by interviewees as ‘unusual’ (Authors, forth-
coming). Monash University secured a 24%
interest in the Malaysian campus through roy-
alties from student fees (Victorian Auditor
General’s Office, 2002).
The University’s decision to establish a
campus in Malaysia received mixed responses
from its broader community. Sections of the
academic community, in particular, were con-
cerned that the university’s international plans
were premature given that it had not dealt
adequately with various campus mergers and
amalgamations that accompanied the abolition
of the binary system of higher education in
Australia:
The university had a number of issues around
the integration of the various bits and pieces
that had been incorporated into Monash.
[These] put pressure on how it was going to
deal with its own diversified base in Australia.
[At] the same time, [it wished] to establish a
footprint in other parts of the world. (Staff
interviewee 1, senior official Monash
University)
190 © 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
The ‘stretching’ out of the university, it was
observed,
placed a great deal of stress on the academic
community – they had to think about things in
a different way, they had to be able to support
academic endeavours at a great distance, and
this involved a lot of personal sacrifice includ-
ing travel and changed working conditions.
(Staff interviewee 1, senior official, Monash
University)
Put simply, the expansionist view adopted by
Monash was seen by some academic staff as
‘too aggressive for the base on which it was
being built’, and by 2003, a policy of consoli-
dation over expansion was embraced to allow
‘Greater Monash’ to ‘concentrate on what
they had to do domestically about defining the
university’.
In Lefebvre’s triadic approach, the MUM
campus may be analysed to show the routine
activities of higher education around recruit-
ment strategies and targets, teaching spaces,
programmes of study, and specialist staff; the
conceptualisation of these in the university’s
policy and planning; and the images and eve-
ryday experiences that ‘being an international
university’ would entail. It is to these social and
spatial practices involving a student market that
we now turn.
The student market
In 2012, MUM enrolled some 6031 students,
30% international and the rest domestic stu-
dents (Monash University, 2014). The top five
sending countries were Indonesia (42.4%), Sri
Lanka (12.2 %), Bangladesh (5.4%), Singapore
(4.4%) and Mauritius (4.2%). The most popular
fields of study for international students were
Business followed by Engineering and Science.
At the time of our study, the local student cohort
was predominantly Malaysian–Chinese drawn
from the not-for-profit private Chinese school
sector with financial resources to pay the rela-
tively high fees.
Student interviewees gave a range of reasons
for choosing Monash, most prominent of which
were the transnational opportunities arising
from their acquisition of a globally recognised,
Anglophone education credential. For domestic

students, a definite attraction was the possibility
of a ‘freer’ environment to participate in stu-
dents’ activities without the surveillance com-
monly associated with state universities:
[MUM] is freer. The local universities are so
rooted in politics; curriculum is controlled;
national universities can breed ethnic hatred.
(Student interviewee 1, domestic student)
[I wanted] an environment where student poli-
tics is allowed as these experiences also shape
one’s learning. (Student interviewee 6, domes-
tic student)
For international students, a peripatetic child-
hood, spent with families that were themselves
transnationally mobile, placed them outside
their respective national education systems
ruling out entry into a national university. Some,
notably those from Islamic countries, were posi-
tively predisposed to Malaysia as a study desti-
nation, regarding it as a site of an alternative,
hybrid modernity, as this account suggests:
[My father] was interested in an Islamic
country that was open-minded. [His idea was]
‘see what they do, how they did it, how they
bring religion together with Science – so you
can make changes back at home. (Student
interviewee 3, international student)
This impression resonates with the marketing
narratives of the country’s Ministry of Higher
Education which constructs Malaysia as a
modern study destination, economically
dynamic, multicultural and politically stable:
‘Currently ranked 11th worldwide by UNESCO
as a destination’; ‘a mini Asia’, ‘a model multi-
cultural society’ and a ‘leading exporter of
manufactured goods’ (MOHE 2014).
MUM’s marketing technologies also draw on
these images and representations of Malaysia’s
modernity, while instilling imaginaries of an
excellent, globally transposable education
credential:
The Malaysia campus of Monash University is
an exemplar of transnational education [and]
while we are firmly engaged in Malaysia and
the region, our focus is also relentlessly global,
so our graduates emerge ready to transform the
world around them. (Monash University, 2014)
© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
International campus: Monash Malaysia
A degree from Monash University Malaysia is
your ticket to the Asian Century and the world.
We’re all about teaching excellence, global
thinking, community engagement, student
support, and research that tackles world prob-
lems. (Monash University 2014)
Not surprisingly, domestic (and international)
student interviewees saw the Monash degree
as offering ‘exit’ opportunities to leave Malaysia
to find employment and study opportunities
further afield.
The presence of domestic and international
students is significant not only in terms of the
physical campus of MUM; it is also significant
for shaping the broader urban environment of
which the university is part. Student markets in
housing, transport, leisure and consumption,
more broadly, have contributed to Bandar
Sunway’s commercial vitality. The campus’
success has also buoyed the Sunway Group’s
education and real estate interests. Sunway Uni-
versity, for example, is now considered a suc-
cessful provider of private higher education in
its own right and an increasingly popular choice
amongst regional students seeking an Anglo-
phone education.
Expansion of MUM to include the develop-
ment of a medical school has been facilitated by
Sunway Group’s financial support via the Jeffrey
Cheah Foundation. By providing equity schol-
arships the Group secures a very positive public
relations profile for itself (Sunway Group, 2014).
Notwithstanding its significant philanthropic
contributions, the Sunway Group like many
successful non-bumiputera businesses is known
for its pragmatic and politically conservative
position-taking (Davison and Murphy, 2012:
235). The Group was described by one domes-
tic student as ‘a very traditional Chinese family
firm’ (interviewee 10) whose business successes
were advanced by its acquiescence to, and alli-
ances with, the prevailing political order.
Monash University, the parent campus, has
been alert to the social and political currents
within Malaysia and has approached the devel-
opment of the campus guided by advice from its
joint-venture partner. In the Malaysian context,
close ties between business and political elites
(Gomez and Jomo, 1999), the continued use of
repressive legislation to manage political oppo-
sition and civil society, and the concentration of
191
 D.R. Sidhu and P. Christie
media ownership by governing parties,
combine to encourage conservative social insti-
tutions in Malaysia.
Commenting on the governance of Malaysian
higher education, Jomo (2004) offers the pres-
cient observation that ‘the regime’s obsession
with controlling campus dissent . . . stood in the
way of urgently needed reforms to higher edu-
cation in order to better prepare the Malaysian
population for rapid cultural and technological
changes’ (16). This viewpoint certainly reso-
nated with the MUM students we interviewed,
who desired a dynamic campus experience,
one they perceived as comparable to an Aus-
tralian university experience. The university’s
promotional materials portray a vivid and
dynamic student life; however, the alliance part-
ners seemed all too aware that their institutions
must operate within the constraints of Malay-
sia’s political environment:
We have laws which state very clearly that if
our students misbehave, the Chief Executive
goes to jail. It’s part of the Education Act.
(Senior staff interviewee 6, joint-venture
partner institution)
I feel frustrated when the administration says
we are like Australia. To me the campus is
typically Malaysian. There is barely any
freedom of speech here. I find it restrictive.
(Student interviewee 6, domestic student)
The student market, put simply, is instructive
of the ‘complex connectivities’ that constitute
student aspirations and desires for private higher
education, and the conditions of possibility it
offers, from post-racial social relations and
solidarities to transnational education and
employment opportunities. We conclude with a
discussion of the scalar politics that have
enabled this hybrid institution to ‘succeed’.
Conclusions
This paper has used a Lefebvrean sociospatial
framework to present a situated analysis of the
complex scalar politics – global, regional,
national, local, and institutional – that enabled
the development of a particular branch campus,
MUM. Lefebvre’s (1991) analytic provides a
unitary framework for tracing the multiplicity of
interpenetrating, multiscalar activities that make
192 © 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
up social space, assembling at a single point.
The challenge is to analyse simultaneously what
occurs on a global scale as well as ‘all the
spaces subsidiary to it, at every possible level’,
showing ‘not just one social relationship but a
host of them’ (88), the ‘unlimited multiplicity’ of
intertwined social spaces (86).
Using a Lefebvrean approach, the case study
illustrates how global shifts (in this case, in
transnational higher education) engage with the
territorial arrangements of the nation state (spe-
cifically, the ethno-religious stratification and
development aspirations of postcolonial Malay-
sia), as well as the reconfiguration of local
spaces (in this case, the entrepreneurship of the
local Sunway group in developing the township
of Bandar Sunway, and its partnership with
Monash Australia to produce the mutually ben-
eficial outcome of an international branch
campus in this particular local site). Rather than
reading the case study of MUM as a set of
effects arising from globalising neoliberal logics
or the neo-imperalising strategies of a ‘western’
educational institution, the paper suggests that
the campus and joint-venture may be under-
stood as a matrix of different spatial practices
that strand together: the economic development
strategies of the ethnicised Malaysian state,
including its plans for expanding higher educa-
tion; the entrepreneurial activities of the
Sunway conglomerate which linked property
development to the provision of higher educa-
tion; the internationalisation imperatives of
Monash University’s parent campus in response
to the Australian government’s higher education
policies; and the operations of a student market,
willing and able to pay for private higher edu-
cation at MUM.
MUM was originally conceived to meet
domestic demand, but nesting within this
rationale were others drivers – a ‘pressure valve’
to assuage disquiet amongst non-bumiputera
Malaysians, and a set of economic opportuni-
ties for the local developer, the Sunway Group.
The Bandar Sunway project, including MUM, is
a striking case study of local ingenuity, illustrat-
ing how class and ethno-religious interests may
be mediated towards convenient ends by
Malaysia’s business and political elites. Simul-
taneously, for its Australian partner, MUM was a
site for the materialisation of its global profile-
making vision, embarked on to differentiate

itself from other Australian universities. Addi-
tionally, the joint venture resonated with various
development projects intended to further the
hypermodern remodelling of the urban-regional
landscape of greater KL, and through this con-
solidate the city’s multifaceted identity as an
aspiring global city, a thriving centre of
Chinese_ dominated commerce and a federal
territory reflecting Malay dominance. The
place-making practices underpinning Bandar
Sunway and MUM are thus reflective and con-
stitutive of how discourses of globalisation have
been localised to support the political economy
of the Malaysian nation state.
Last but not least, the campus’ development
confirms the important roles of nation states as
institutional actors in the broader globalisation
of higher education. The Malaysian govern-
ment’s Vision 2020 plan to transform Malaysia
into an information and knowledge economy
articulated with the joint-venture partners’ aspi-
rations. In a similar vein, Australian higher edu-
cation reforms to build an education export
industry to reduce the reliance of public univer-
sities on the government purse drove Monash
towards its ‘global university’ differentiation
strategy which, although successful, has not
materialised into a profit-generating enterprise,
nor was it expected to. The Malaysian campus,
by far the most successful of its overseas ven-
tures, operates along the lines of a not-for-profit
enterprise.
Elsewhere our analyses of spatial and repre-
sentational practices point to the frictions and
faultlines that constitute the branch campus and
the ‘international education’ on offer (Sidhu and
Christie, 2014). On the one hand, the universi-
ty’s success rides on the aspirations of its students
to use an international university credential to
imagine new livelihoods, new identities and
solidarities. MUM’s credentials position some of
its students, at least, to ‘jump scales’ – to look
towards the transnational sphere to build ‘navi-
gational capacities’ for a good life (see also
Collins et al., in press). On the other hand, MUM
is constrained by the frictions and contestations
that shape the national space. Ethno-racial
polarisations continue to stand in tension with
the aspirations of some staff and students to
co-create a more cosmopolitan space without
the essentialisations that define Malaysian politi-
cal culture and everyday life.
© 2014 Victoria University of Wellington and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
International campus: Monash Malaysia
The case study of MUM points to the emer-
gence of a hybrid model of private higher edu-
cation, drawing its identity from its urbanised,
settings, shaped by market efficiencies, business
philanthropy, pragmatism and political con-
servatism. The possibilities of such a model trav-
elling back to the Anglophone world, with
effects on existing structures and cultures of
higher education, is an area worthy of further
investigation.
Notes
1 Emergent themes included ‘key actors and their
spheres of influence’, ‘state-provider relations’, ‘student
markets’, ‘campus life’ and ‘identity/subjectivities’.
2 The Chinese alliance partner in the government, the
MCA (Malaysian Chinese Association), owns Universiti
Tunku Abdul Rahman; government-linked companies
own The Multimedia University of Malaysia (est 1997),
National Tenaga University (est 1997), and the
Petronas National University (est 1997) are owned by
government-linked companies. Universiti Tun Razak
(UNITAR), a bumiputera-owned private university.
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Appendix I
Staff participants
Staff Interviewee 1 Senior Official, Monash
University Australia.
Interviewee 2 Senior Official, Monash Univer-
sity Australia.
Interviewee 3 Executive Manager Monash
University.
Interviewee 4 Executive Manager, Monash
University Malaysia (MUM).
Interviewee 5 Executive Manager, MUM.
Interviewee 6 Executive Manager Sunway
Group.
 International campus: Monash Malaysia

Interviewee 7 Executive Manager, Sunway Interviewee 7 Humanities/Communication,

Group. female, Indonesian/Javanese.
Interviewee 8 Business/International Relations,
female, Sri Lankan/Singhalese.
Student participants
Interviewee 9 Commerce, female, Malaysian-
Interviewee 1 Science, female, Malay- Chinese.
Malaysian. Interviewee 10 Humanities/Communication,
Interviewee 2 Engineering, male, Indian. female, Malaysian-Chinese.
Interviewee 3 Engineering, male, African. Interviewee 11 Engineering, female, Interna-
Interviewee 4 Engineering/Information tional student, dual nationality.
Technology(IT), male, Bangladesh. Interviewee 12 Commerce, male, Bangladesh.
Interviewee 5 IT, male, European national. Interviewee 13 Information Technology, female,
Interviewee 6 Environmental Sciences, male, Indian.
Malaysian-Chinese.

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