Terence Fernandez is to be commended for bringing "the rot" down to earth. His analysis provides the rare opportunity to highlight the case where, to the best of my knowledge, the "rot" literally forced the vice-chancellor of the leading Universiti Malaya to resign!

This scenario highlights the fact that, although the highly acclaimed recent national acknowledgement the late Professor Syed Hussein Alatas is warmly welcomed, his efforts to ‘stop the rot' in UM through reforms, totally failed.

Instead, the rot stopped him!

This is not the place to focus on the ‘blow-by-blow' opposition to the fundamental structural reforms he tried to introduce in areas such as curricula and the appointment of professors based on merit.

Indeed, Alatas himself explained that the reason was because the opposition was largely from "professors kangkong"- empty at the stem! Alas and unfortunately, Hussein lamented that although a ‘brain drain' out of the varsity for these professors might be a solution, but regrettably the basic problem was "where are the drains (meaning universities) that will accept such brains"!

But to Alatas, the "rot" was basically reinforced by his theory of "the high cost of flattery". Because of the 13 state nation was ‘obsessed' in granting annual ‘merit' awards to literally millions of Malaysians, Alatas argued that this had created a stratified hierarchy of so-called ‘achievers' in universities, who were lulled into a state of complacency by relying on these honourary titles for determining competence and capability and based on the criteria of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine".

At least in one private university-college a Tan Sri blatantly uses the title "Dr" without possessing the PhD.

Unfortunately Professor Alatas was unable to complete and publish his thesis due to his untimely demise. The ‘high cost of flattery' is now so entrenched in the status quo, making it virtually impossible to institute radical reforms to address and hopefully eliminate the "rot".

Professor Alatas would have been delighted with the defining observation of Terrence himself. "As long as the herd mentality and partisan policies continue to infiltrate our education system, we can bet that it will be a matter of time before Malaysian universities disappear from (international) rankings".