The World Universities Peace Invitational Debate (WUPID

The World Universities Peace Invitational Debate (WUPID) will be held from the 19th to 24th of December here in UPM.

Read more on WUPID here.

A good read for Monday morning.

Here's an article I linked from the Star online today. Can't help but to put it up.

Credit to The Star online. The original article can be found here.

It’s the learning, st****

Why Not?

By RASLAN SHARIF

There is indeed a higher purpose to being at a university. And it’s all about wanting to learn and cultivating the ability to do so.
I remember vividly many things that I had to go through during the first week of university life.
Eighteen years old and fresh out of school, the day I set foot in what was then known as Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (UPM) in Serdang, Selangor, was an eye-opening experience.
First of all, it was insisted by well-meaning family members that I wear proper attire for the big day. I was, after all, entering the “menara gading”.
A bit on that phrase, if I may digress. “Menara gading” is a direct Bahasa Malaysia translation of the English “ivory tower”.

However, whereas the English phrase is used negatively to denote academic elitism and isolationism, in Bahasa Malaysia, it has a more positive connotation, symbolic of a good thing. The university, that pinnacle of education, entrance into which was very much desired by many.
Talk about being lost in translation, eh?

Anyway, my entrance was hardly grand. I was decked out in batik and slacks.
To top it all off, few male freshmen were similarly attired. Many wore t-shirts or short-sleeved shirts and khakis. Some were even in jeans.
Truly eye-opening.

Another new experience was the process of registering myself as a student. There were many forms to fill.
I remember lining up to submit one of the forms and as my turn came, I approached the desk and handed it in.
There were two people behind the desk and while one of them went through the form, the other, who looked like he had time to kill, asked me what sounded like a trick question - why had I come to university?
I more or less told him that I thought this was my ticket to the big time.
He gave me a pained expression and shook his head in a disapproving manner.
Maybe he was expecting an answer along the lines of “for the love/pursuit/glory of knowledge”, but that would have been stretching it by at least several miles on my part.
And I gather it would have been stretching it on the part of many others who attended UPM around the time that I did. We were all looking to get half-decent jobs with our degrees and diplomas.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The guy turned out to be one of those facilitators in charge of the freshmen intake.
As freshies, we had to go through Orientation Week, which ostensibly would help us get all settled down into university life.
In reality, it was a chance for some seniors who “volunteered” to be facilitators to play leader. Others saw it as an opportunity to get close to some of the more attractive freshies by flogging their “abang angkat-adik angkat” schemes.
Orientation Week was a drag. Besides lots of giggly juvenile stuff, talks by the facilitators, usually held late at night, were part of the orientation programme.
Now, our friend with the trick question took the opportunity one evening to recount the encounter he had with one of the freshies — the one with me.
He then went philosophical on our purpose in university. I swear he choked a bit when he got to the part on the huge sacrifices our parents had made to send us there.
It’s true.

I’m not making this up.

This is not to say that his arguments amounted to nothing more than a yawn. A good university education is so much more than the job one hopes to get with it.
There is indeed a higher purpose to being at a university. The only problem was that many of us were simply too short-sighted to see what this higher purpose was, let alone reach it.
Besides, the parents who had made those huge sacrifices also had high expectations of their children, namely that a university education would help them snag a good gig, if not in the private sector, then at least in the civil service.

Who can blame the sons and daughters if they shared the same “dream”, especially if they came from a family background filled with hardship and difficulty?
Well, reality bit just after graduation. This was in the mid-1980s and the state of the economy was nothing to write home about.
There weren’t that many of those “good” jobs to go around for degree and diploma-holders out of public university. The best-paying ones, if I remember correctly, were in teaching and in banking.

The situation was not what many of us had hoped for. Inevitably, the common complaint among graduates was that it was difficult getting a job.
Sound familiar? It would seem that things have not changed much since I left university.
Today, graduates are still whining about how tough it is to land a job.
Second Finance Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah said the other day that our graduate unemployment rate is one of the highest at 4%, compared to countries like Ireland, South Korea and Singapore.

He laid the blame squarely on “the mismatch between our industry’s needs and the output from the local universities” and described our institutions of higher learning as having “proven to be a disappointment”.
These are tough words for a tough situation.

But our undergraduates, especially those in our public universities, are not blameless either.
Universities should not just be about the teaching of students. More importantly, there needs to be a learning by the students.

You won’t get very far trying to teach a person something if that person, for whatever reason, has little inclination to learn.
It would seem that we need to give our undergraduates a little prodding in the right direction.
Husni hinted as much, saying that “if there is a lack of self-induced factors in our in our undergraduates ... to strive for greater performance, maybe we should introduce external factors to drive excellence.”

I’m all for the big stick being wielded, for there is a higher purpose to being at university.
And it’s all about wanting to learn and cultivating the ability to learn.
That’s the big ticket. Once you have that, everything else will fall into place.

> Raslan Sharif scraped through UPM and got a Diploma in Agribusiness. He has worked as a stock trader, a journalist and is now a public relations consultant. Go figure.