It was both defining and timely that the recent Malaysian Social Science conference should have adopted the theme ‘Critical Transition’ and focused on the important question of the state of the art in social research.

The call for more critical theory-oriented research to overcome the so called ‘psychological fear’ of criticising government policies was well-explained as nothing more than an excuse for presenting papers that were descriptive rather than analytical, because writers generally did not seem to have the capacity or capability to undertake theory-building research.

But I hasten to point out that the ‘fault’ for this lies not so much in the researchers themselves, but in what I would identify as ‘poverty in the culture of inquiry’ that unfortunately appears to permeate the intellectual and academic environment in public universities.

As a consequence much of the research in the vital areas of social change is status quo-oriented rather than within vistas of dynamic and accelerated change. The entire emphasis therefore tends to be to undertake research ‘within’ the system rather than in changes ‘of’ the system.

Professor Syed Hussein Alatas, who was widely acknowledged, both nationally and internationally as a foremost scholar, intellectual and academic in the social sciences and a linguist to boot, put it succinctly in saying that the main reason for this is to be found in academics functioning within what he called ‘trapped minds’.

The legacy of the combination of the post-feudal and neo-colonial ideologies in the political system had resulted in the generation of a class of academics with such minds with the consequence of what Alatas called ‘Professor(s) Kangkong’- empty at the heart.

But this is not to say that this was always the case. Within three years of the founding of USM, a separate Centre for Policy research was established where lecturers were seconded full-time so that they might undertake new research to strengthen theory-building research and to upgrade the content of their lectures.

Even students were directly involved in field placements (during the then three-month annual long vacations) so that they made invaluable contributions to the success of the projects, not to mention the significant difference it made to their own academic work and research.

It needs to be recorded that the CPR undertook projects with the Orang Asli community as far away as in north-east Thailand as well as locally in the Muda Irrigation Scheme and produced a report on research findings titled ‘Fishing in troubled waters’

Although I firmly believe that social research is at the ‘heart’ of any good university teaching programme, unfortunately it might be necessary to set up a separate university for this purpose here.

We will not be alone in doing this as envisaged for instance in the New School for Social Research in New York.