The topic about university excellence rises again as a response to the initiative of the government and the Ministry of Education in particular to propose the new higher education plan following the recent Malaysia Education Blueprint for School Level. In principle, the Malaysian Higher Education Plan aims at producing holistic and integrated learned values-driven talent in line with the National Education Policy.
No doubt that enhancing the quality of universities is definitely a more challenging task compared to schools. It is the most crucial level of education where ideas and theories are seriously trashed out and later on most of them will be translated into policies to be implemented in various fields. University students who are the main participants at this level will be the active recipients of the ideas and theories and most of whom later on will play the role of the implementers of the policies once they graduate and hold various positions within the country and outside. This will mean that any discrepancy at this level of education would surely implicate the future of the country and the world as a whole.
The question at hand is, with hundreds of higher learning institutions mushrooming in the country and producing thousands of graduates annually, are we satisfied with the quality of our higher education?
Indeed, the increasing number institutions would not necessarily be a good indication of a better higher education. Unless the quality of higher education is strengthened, the negative impression on the role of the university will still prevail such as the view of Harry Lewis, a professor in Harvard University who criticized his own university’s administration in his book Excellence Without Soul (2006). Perhaps, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th American President’s might represent a more sceptical view on the quality of a university when he said “a man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car (wagon); but if he has a university education, he may steal the railroad.”
Hence, it all goes back to the very meaning of a university and its role. Simply put, how do we develop a good university? What are the criteria of a good university?
Cardinal John Henry Newman, an important figure in the religious history of England, began his monumental book, The Idea of a University, with an important assertion that university is ‘a place of teaching universal knowledge.’
While contemporary Muslim scholar and thinker, Prof. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, in his book Islam and Secularism, points out that a university must reflect the nature of man, since the word, ‘university’, which is derived from the Latin universitatem, reflects the original Islamic Arabic term kulliyyah which means faculty, or a power inherent in the body of the human being.
The ideas from both these Muslim and Christian thinkers can throw some light on the nature of a good university.
The first implies the intellectuality and universality of a university, while the second emphasises the organic and integrated nature of a university.
The first is important since it reflects the unique character of higher learning which is being intellectual. Since the target group of higher learning is the educated youths whose ability to think and contemplate is greater, they have to be inculcated with universal knowledge or wisdom which enables them to look at things in a wider perspective or from an eagle’s eye point of view.
Universal knowledge approaches reality from a more philosophical level as to position the reality into its proper places. It is against the knowledge that is too specific and technical to the effect that students are neither able to look at the reality in a wider perspective, and more unfortunately, place things in the wrong places nor can they connect one discipline of knowledge to another.
Ethics and religion, if understood in a proper manner, play the role of the universal knowledge. They project a worldview which is universal in nature that encompasses the complete way of life in this world and the hereafter.
The present situation that we witness is that some universities lose the nature of teaching universal knowledge when all sorts of specialised knowledge are taught and not being balanced by universal knowledge. The perspective becomes too narrow to the effect that students are not able to look at things in a proper comprehensive manner.
The second idea put forward by Prof. al-Attas is important due to the fact that a good university must reflect human beings. Just as human beings have many faculties which are guided by their intellect or rational soul, a university must also work in a way that there must be a faculty or a group of knowledge that lead other disciplines of knowledge in order to have a systematic and integrated approach in all its faculties. In Islam this integration is represented by the dynamic relation between the fard ‘ayn and fard kifayah knowledge.
A university must not only be driven by its general vision and mission being put nicely on the wall and stones, but the mission and vision have to be put into specific details to inhere and be integrated into the curriculum and be translated and cascaded throughout all courses in the university irrespective of fields and specialisations. There must be a centre in a university, just like an intellect for a man, to serve as a point of reference concerning all the principles and values that will be shared by all other ‘organs’ of the university. This is in order for the university to move and ‘think’ in an organic way as reflected in its role as a man with a ‘universal mind’. All faculties in the university, just as faculties in man, will move in a unified, consistent and systematic way.
The Quran mentions a group of people who are given the heart and other faculties yet do not use them properly (they have hearts wherewith they understand not, eyes wherewith they see not and ears wherewith they hear not , al-A’raf, 7:179). Just as a universal man should have a harmonious relation between his heart, reason and other faculties, a good university which is a macrocosmic representation of man, may also take the same reminder of the Quran to develop a more universal and organic nature of its curriculum and administration.
