Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Quick Rafiah Update

After being appointed as the vice-chancellor of Universiti Malaya 2 months back, through the Sunday Star Education segment, we have received a little bit of feedback as to what Datuk Rafiah Salim thinks needs to be done at Universiti Malaya.

This is on top of her earlier announced target of an increase in postgraduate enrollment of 50% by 2015 as blogged by Kian Ming here.
Universiti Malaya (UM) vice-chancellor Datuk Rafiah Salim has done an analysis of the institution’s strengths and weaknesses.

More than a month after taking up the post, Rafiah said that while UM is good in medical science, law and research, the number of international students and academics should be increased.

“However, there is a need to balance this with the development of our own human capital. In raising UM’s ranking, we must be careful not to compromise the national agenda,” said Rafiah.

She added that the university also needed to focus more on the study of Islamic commerce and increase international publications.
Nothing too juicy in the above statements, but it's an update nevertheless. So we continue to wait and see.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Certainly the university needs to be more approachable to applicants who intend to take up a program with it. Sometimes I wonder whether the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. Email feedback on acceptance or rejection for postgraduate programs should be more progressive.

Jerng said...

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Anonymous said...

".... we must be careful not to compromise the national agenda" - ?? apa ini?

What is the national agenda? = UMNO agenda? Spell it out please? Does it mean more manipulations to achieve certain man-made agenda? Does it mean different rules for different people, according to the national agenda (whatever it is)?

UM does not seem to learn that to achieve academic excellence, there must not be hidden agenda to restrict UM from implementing processes based solely on real meritocracy, excellence, and eminence.

Can't help the déjà vu feeling! History repeats itself. Bye bye UM, whose standard is heading south.

kayron said...

"the number of international students and academics should be increased"

I agree with with the plan to increase international students and academics. However, gov should provide a clearer guidelines about this. My main concerns are NOT to make education as business, in which make our degree look cheaper if everybody can obtain it. We need to have more international students, but we must not compromise quality with quantity. International student should compete equally (if not better) with local candidates.

If we want to increase international academicians, we must make sure that they are really good. In current practice, seems like there's so many lecturers from India in public universities and university colleges. I'm not being racist...just hate to see hard earned tax payers money flows to drains..probably we have such a modest budget to hire high level academicians..We get what we paid for....

Anonymous said...

I believe this is just a fool's effort to try to bolster UM's THES World Uni Ranking by scoring in the international student category. Remember how their top 100 ranking was erroneously achieved?

Anyway, I say charity begins at home. Until and unless our qualified local students have sufficient uni places, international students will have to wait. We have nothing to attract top caliber students from advanced countries to contribute to the diversity of ideas here while students from third world countries can't contribute much and we may end up having to pay for their scholarships too.

Anonymous said...

Learn From History
With due respect Rafiah Salim is a government servant. So no choice la...regarding her statements

Anonymous said...

At least rafiah salim is better than hashim bill board...the campus is now free from all the banners and buntings and bill boards

Anonymous said...

I hope she has a better plan than what she is saying now. However, the fact, she is spouting a couple of very standard politically correct lines only tells me this is not a dynamic person in any way. I believe she is competent and would be better than the last VC simply because it could not have been any worst.

Of all the lines she talk about the statement that the medical law faculty is good is of concern because we know they are of low standards since they are not recognized by no one else and frankly at the bottom of the choices for law firm and private hospital in KL.