What happened? [ Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia’s first university to be granted Accelerated Programme For Excellence (Apex) status is battling construction problems, fee hikes, terminated contracts and cuts in research grants. The university’s Science and Engineering Research Centre (SERC), costing RM21 million is under utilised while another research centre costing RM14 million had its construction stalled for two years, reported The Star. According to Chung, a USM postgraduate student, he only used the SERC to “enjoy the air-conditioning”, while Afiq, a final-year aerospace student said he thought the uncompleted research centre had been abandoned. “These are meant to be high-impact research laboratories but the buildings do not seem convincing,” said Afiq. The developer of the second research centre is supposedly not registered with the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB), and had run off without paying the university rental for four months. The SERC’s senior scientific officer Hariy Pauzi, however, claimed that the research centre was fully functional and had a microscope and other “high-end instruments” which were worth about RM14 million altogether. “We are starting to generate income. About a few hundred thousand ringgit last year. We just need to wait for funding to buy more equipment,” she said. USM said it had asked the government for RM789.5mil for the fiscal years between 2009 to 2012, but received less than half – RM314.5million – of the amount. It claims that this shortfall hindered its plans to achieve its target of becoming the country’s first world-class university. “The university has not received its requested budget since 2010,” said USM vice-chancellor Prof Dr Omar Osman. “What we are doing now is looking for ways to get the necessary funds.” Admitting that fewer fellowships were being offered, Omar explained it away saying that they didn’t want people who did research work “to just pass the time”. USM had also more than doubled its fees in the last five years from RM1,200 to RM3,200 per semester for a Masters course. “To produce good research, you need good and accredited laboratories. That is costly, so it is reflected in our fees”, Omar reasoned. Built in 1969, USM is among the five Malaysian universities on the Top 400 list of this year’s QS World University Rankings. On August 27, 2008, USM was given sole Apex status, edging out other applicants including International Islamic Universtiy Malaysia, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Petronas and Universiti Tenaga Nasional. The Higher Education Minister at that time, Mohamad Khaled Nordin, said: “After a thorough evaluation, the committee decided that only one university truly met all the criteria, namely USM”, adding that quantitative and qualitative criteria were used to select USM. “The university that is given apex status is one that has the greatest potential among Malaysian universities to be world-class, and as such, would be given additional assistance to compete with top-ranked global institutions. He said that with the Apex status, USM was expected to move up the World University Rankings with a target of top 200 in five years and top 100, if not top 50, by 2020. ]
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 08:19:49 +0000
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