A RM2 million armed robbery reportedly took place at Universiti Malaya last week. I am not in the least surprised. So what does Datuk Professor Razali Agus, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Student Affairs, have to say now?
After three years of nonsensical rules and regulations in the university emphasising the most trivial of etiquettes, the safety of the university has gone from bad to worse. As a recap, Razali Agus was instrumental in enforcing the "no shorts, no sandles" policy in residential hostels on the pretext of instilling discipline, reducing sexual harassment and promoting religious tolerance and mutual respect for certain individuals who somehow find a hairy male leg to be sexually enticing. He was also notorious for the distribution of leaftlets and posters warning students not to be involved in activities organised by opposition parties on the reasoning that such activities 'merosakkan akhlak mahasiswa'. Not too long ago, in early 2005, the Student Affairs Department decreed that all university students must wear their student ID tag 'at all times' while on campus grounds, even when one is drenched in sweat from sports.
Under his administration, residential colleges operated like secondary schools with hostel wardens stationed like school prefects to literally catch those brazen enough to test these irrational rules. Trivial 'offences' like the wearing of short pants on hostel grounds were regarded to be religiously offensive and sexually immoral to such a severity that it warranted expulsion.
Meanwhile, more serious issues like public smoking, homosexualism, thefts and vandalism are conveniently disregarded as something inevitable and unavoidable. Strangers enter and exit the university and residential hostels at their pleasure, while harmless university students are harassed for "indecent attire", "inappropriate male-female interaction" and "challenging the integrity of the university".
The deputy vice-chancellor should now eat humble pie and admit that he was on the wrong witchhunt all along. The RM 2 million heist is evidence that moral policing in the university is, pardon me, downright stupid.
The greatest threat to the university comes not from students donning different attire from that of their Muslim colleagues or subscribing to a political ideology that is not of Umno origin. Rather, the greatest threat to the survival of Malaysia's oldest university is that of incompetent office- bearers who seemingly have their priorities misplaced and are instead more committed to stifling freedom of thought and expression and subjugating students of different ethnicities and religion to the practices of a single dominant religion.
This is not a poison-open letter written with the intention of character assassination. This is a truthful eye-witness account written with the intention to inform the Malaysian public of the on-goings in Universiti Malaya.
