SOMETIME ago, Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik mentioned his aspiration of turning International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) into the “Oxford of Islamic countries”, following his controversial appointment as the university’s president.

It is easy to get cynical about dreams that are such a tall order, considering the amount of research funding, talent, world-class infrastructure, and reputation-building needed to achieve it.

There is a reason why the top universities in the world are all hundreds of years old, although the Singaporean universities have shown that it is not impossible to be both young and accomplished, at least in terms of rankings.

Lest we get dejected by the gargantuan task ahead, I do think there are simpler milestones for Malaysian public universities to reach in our road to “Oxford”, many of which are drawn from my own experiences studying in Kelantan, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. While they aren’t easy to achieve, they aren’t overly costly too.

The first milestone to achieve is trust-building, which has two elements.

The first element is trust between the administrator of the university and the student. The many ways in which our universities infantilise our students have to stop. We cannot run universities as if they are boot camps. Administrators need to curb their suspicion that students are up to no good all the time.

If students are to enter society as independent, involved, and dynamic individuals, they need to stop being monitored, cradled, and belittled in universities. Two common features that are shared by almost all world-class universities are good student representation and vibrant student activism.

While the promised repeal of the Universities and University Colleges Act is welcomed in this respect, the desired goal is to nurture genuine trust so that our universities can be supportive environments in which students can thrive as a community and as individuals.

The second element is trust between students. One thing I notice immediately while attending universities away from Malaysia is how students can just leave their laptops in libraries unattended.

And it is not entirely an affair of social class-cum-trust because I find the practice to be more rampant in the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (NTU) than in Cambridge, the former obviously having a more socio-economically heterogeneous mix of students than the latter.

Granted, an arguable reason for NTU’s observed exceptionality is the incredibly low crime rates in Singapore. Still, I don’t think there is any excuse for not having a petty-crime free campus, let’s say in our crème de la crème, Universiti Malaya.

If administrators can divert their attention from the strict monitoring of students’ activities, more certainly can be done for campus security. Vigilance and trust need not be mutually exclusive. It only depends on what the vision of the university’s leader is.

Trust between students is not just for crime prevention’s sake. It is an important social capital to have, for it helps to nurture a great environment for studying, spills into social harmony building, and fosters the kind of strong alumni networks world-renowned universities tend to enjoy.

The next milestone is the availability of professional research and well-being support. A good university should be staffed by competent and dedicated librarians, lab technicians, and counsellors.

A case in point: I recently emailed the librarian at the University of Oxford for queries regarding their Commonwealth collection, and a detailed reply was received the next day. I am not even a student there, to begin with.

This, of course, also follows from the element of trust – on top of competence – I spoke about earlier. The librarian obviously trusted me as a genuine researcher worthy of handling their historical artifacts. The same can be said for libraries and librarians in Cambridge, with the main library not even having those scanners used in stores to prevent shoplifting.

Students should be able to rely on university staff for support, such as having counsellors they feel comfortable to talk to, and not people who will betray such trust to please the powers-to-be or a sense of religious righteousness. A student should always feel that he/she is reaching out to a peer, not a superior or a warden.

One last aspect, and this is something perhaps we can even outdo the University of Oxford in, is student diversity. Oxford, as we know, is under serious criticism for its lack of ethnic and class diversity among students. It is regarded as the bastion of white privilege, as many other elite universities are.

We certainly can do better in this respect given the relative youth of our universities. Unfortunately, for IIUM, an Islamic university has also translated into a Muslim university.

In case the reactionaries think that I am calling for de-Islamising IIUM, I don’t think it involves any trade-offs here.  In fact, the university should leverage its Islamic tradition and English-language environment to establish itself as a world-renowned institution for Islamic studies and the learning of Arabic, subjects which are in high demand among both Muslim and non-Muslim students.

What is needed is merely a diversification of the curriculum and campus culture so that non-Muslims can easily integrate into the environment. For starters, a less stifling dress code (dress codes suggest less trust between student and administrators) would certainly be welcomed.

Needless to say, trust, competence, and diversity can be – though not necessarily – the products of a university’s elite status. A university which selects its staff and students more prudently, as most elite universities do, will achieve some of the goals mentioned easier. And I am not saying elitism in universities is not a problem.

But considering where our universities are at now, we certainly do have the luxury of reaching the bridge first before even thinking about crossing it. – October 28, 2018.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.