COMMENT The Bawani-Sharifah affair has unearthed what I have suspected for 26 years of being an academic at a public university. I have long believed that Malaysian public universities prefer to train our university students to be workers in offices and not leaders of societies.

Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) law student KS Bawani ( right ) mentions that she thought the session was a brainwashing session where a heavily one-sided anti-Bersih view was propagated. A discourse should have a balance of two opposing views to trigger critical thinking. But as I have found out after more than a quarter of century, the public university is not the place to have critical views on issues of national importance...