I refer to the letter from Product of the System regarding ailing medical schools in the country. I am a product of the country's premier law school, which is also increasingly stricken with the ailment not unlike that mentioned by Product of the System.
Perhaps I am luckier than Product of the System because when I was in law school, all my deans and most of the senior academics were very distinguished and internationally acclaimed intellectuals who are extremely proficient in the English language.
However, I fear for the younger generations of law students as I witness these excellent individuals being replaced by mediocre young academics whose command of the English language is way below par.
Fancy a law tutor asking his students 'Are you understand?'. I kid you not. This is my personal real-life experience. And for the lawyers out there, have you ever heard of a tort lecturer who has a masters degree but has never heard of The Wagon Mound? And mind you, this lecturer, who also has difficulties expressing himself in English, got both his degrees from England and is studying for PhD, also in England.
Like the medical school lecturers mentioned by Product of the System, many of these young lecturers join the academic ranks through the Skim Latihan Bumiputera (Slab) and have never ever been exposed to the real legal world before joining the faculty.
In fact, they are fresh graduates - some of whom do not even possess good results for their first degree - who are given grants under Slab to study for their LL.M degrees while working as lecturers or tutors. Needless to say, they are quickly promoted despite their inadequacies.
If our premier law school is facing such ailment, I dare not think about other law schools in the country. Imagine what kind of doctors, engineers, lawyers and accountants we will have ten years from now if the rot in our public universities is not stopped soon.
For this, I fully agree with Associate Professor Dr Edmund Terence Gomez's call for all irregularities in our local universities to be looked into and be nipped in the bud. Our prime minister has also called for our premier university to make quality its priority.
However, considering our political situation, both in the country and in the universities, change for the better, I highly suspect, is light years away.
